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Snap Shots: by Harry Flashman
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The “Good Old Days” and today’s digital photography
As technology takes over our lives, we older photographers tend to remember with
much fondness the pre-digital age photography.
One of the most important factors was to see if the shot had a sharp image. With
a portrait, focusing on the eyes was the standard way, but until you got the
negatives back and could check with the enlarger, there were many hours of
anxiety. Had you really got the image that was required, because with
professional photography, if you goofed, you re-shot at your own expense. And if
that shoot included professional model fees, you were going to be considerably
out of pocket.
Those were the days when film was king, and B&W revered for the creativity it
could encourage. In the darkroom, with the magical red light, you became
accustomed to the gloom and would spend time working out the correct exposure
for the exposed photographic paper. This was done by successive exposures,
sliding a cover paper back by two seconds at a time. You then dipped and dunked
and reviewed the exposed and developed sheet and chose the best time under the
enlarger head giving the best exposure.
However, it wasn’t over then. Next you exposed one sheet for the suggested time,
dipped and dunked and reviewed again. This time you looked critically at the
whole print (usually a 10x8) and noted areas that needed ‘burning in’ and other
areas that needed ‘holding back’ (or ‘dodging’) and the process would go on
again until the final, definitive print was made. This process could take
several hours, but your B&W creation was part of your artistic persona.
I was lucky in that I was using a newspaper’s darkroom for my B&W work in those
days, and this had an auto-processor which would take your exposed sheets and
finish printing them in one minute. Sixty seconds of anxiety was not so bad,
compared to dipping, dunking and fixing, which could take 15 minutes.
That was for B&W, but the situation for color negatives was somewhat different -
and, incidentally, the photographic technique was also somewhat different. Where
you looked at light and shadow in B&W, with color you began to look at
contrasting colors and hues. Blues pitched against yellows, reds against whites.
It was also the situation that very few people had access to a color printer,
and this was the province of the professional shooter. You dropped off your
exposed roll of color film and you received back the analyzer report as to the
exposure saturation of the negatives, as well as a roll proof taken from the
negatives. This was the way you checked your expertise with the flash meter and
the exposure meter. The alterations to a print were done in the camera
beforehand, not afterwards as with the B&W photography. As you became more
experienced you could guesstimate the settings needed to visually change the end
result. It was a complete new ball game.
After this period came the scanned print directly into the computer, where color
balance, brightness and contrast could be manipulated, followed by the ability
to take the color negative and scan that into the computer, cutting out the
negative to print step, which came with its resultant lowering of sharpness.
But now we have the fully digital phase of photography, available to everyone,
not just the professionals. Your digital SLR even gives you a choice of
resolution and file types such as RAW or JPEG. And on top of all this, there is
that magical ability to review your photographs while they are still just
electronic images on your memory card.
However, you should not just take the image for granted. You should still
critically review your images and work out what should be done or changed. Just
because you have a DSLR does not mean that you will never get a bad picture. The
photographer has the “eye”, not the camera!
To really hammer this concept home, I was chatting to a pro photographer at the
weekend and he can take 3,000 images on a shoot and was saying how long it takes
him to review all the shots, to make sure he has the best ones!
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