Changes in photography
09/04/16 04:55
On the shelves in my library, among other possessions are serval metal boxes designed for holding 2” x 2” photographic slides. There are an additional group of carousels of more slides. My grandchildren have no idea what those are about. There was a time when they were the height of photographic technology. Color transparencies were the actual film that was in the camera, processed into a positive image, cut from the roll into individual frames, and mounted in cardboard sleeves that were dropped by gravity one by one into a projector. I still own a slide projector, though I don’t think we’ve used it in several years. Like our old record player and cassette player, the technology has been replaced with another form.
Little by little, I have been scanning the slides into the computer so that the images can be stabilized and kept. It is a task of love, I guess. I doubt that it is something that our children or grandchildren would ever care to do. Roughly half of the photographic slides in our home are photographs that I have taken. The other half are photographs taken by our parents. They record some precious memories and reveal some important family history.
In the span of a single generation we have gone from black and white film photography to color digital photographs. That may not be completely accurate. The first commercially successful color process, the Lumière Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, went to market in 1907, before the birth of our parents. But color photography wasn’t common or very affordable for personal use until Kodak developed films and cameras for 35mm color photography in the late 1950’s - well into my lifetime.
At the time of the birth of our children, I was still using black and white film for about half of my photography. I processed the film myself in our basement and made my own prints from negatives using a rather simple enlarger in a makeshift dark room. I also processed my own color slides using the Ektachrome process. We also took many pictures using color negative film, but sent it to commercial labs for processing.
All of that is history now. While there are a few film photographers around, they are few and far between. Film is considered to be exotic and it is rare and expensive. I still have a few film cameras in my collection, but will be disposing of them soon and I haven’t used film for quite a few years now.
Film deteriorates, so the process of scanning the images into the computer is time sensitive. Most of the fading that has already occurred is easily corrected digitally and some of those old images are pretty good.
The new technology has radically changed how we think about and value photographs. Back in the late 1970’s we saved for film and processing for a big trip. I budgeted 72 frames per day, which was two rolls of film, for the time of the trip. That was considered to be extravagant and a very generous about of photography. From those 72 frames, most were processed into slides and shown by projecting them with a slide projector. A typical presentation was 140 slides. The projector I used had two sizes of carousels, 80 and 140 slides.
Today there is no limit on the number of pictures we can take. With my digital camera it isn’t at all uncommon for me to squeeze of a dozen frames and then delete 11 images to get just one. With my phone I will take a picture of a sign or some other item I want to remember for a few minutes and delete the photograph as soon as I get to a place where I can record the information in a more organized fashion.
My way of thinking about photographs has changed.
My grandchildren will never see photography the way I do. Their entire lives have been lived in a world where most phones have built-in cameras and people think nothing of sending a photograph to friends to show what they are doing at the moment. The hugely successful applications instagram and snapchat provide formats for automating the process of sharing digital images with friends.
Snapchat is particularly interesting to me though I don’t use the application myself. The basic concept, as I understand it, is to provide an instant visual message that can be viewed and then automatically discarded. A picture is no longer something that you keep or treasure, but rather a moment that is shared and then automatically deleted. Snap chatters don’t fill up the memory of their phones with thousands of images the way that I do.
Devaluing photographs so that they are viewed and quickly forgotten doesn’t just change the role of photographs in terms of single verses multiple viewing. It also changes how taking photographs is done. It is a completely instant process. Future generations will probably consider it strange that I go out in my boat in the darkness and wait until the light is just right to make a single image. You can already obtain inexpensive game cameras that take pictures without your having to be in the same place. The motion of the animal triggers the camera to record the image.
I’m confident, however, that photography as an art will remain. The options for altering images through the use of filters and other digital manipulations are truly amazing. I am no expert in photoshop, but I do find that spending some time editing my best photographs can yield some dramatic results. I can see how those who master the software and have a good eye for color balance and composition can employ the software as a form of artistic expression. There will still be plenty of places where images will be printed. In fact there are more options for printing photographs in different formats and sizes than was the case back in the days of film photography.
My grandson recently asked me whether or not the world had color back when Jesus was alive. Having seen old black and white photographs he assumed that color itself took time to develop and didn’t exist in prior generations. Most technologies that I see because they are new are practically invisible to him. He will discover artistic expression in media that I can’t even imagine. Still, there is something very powerful about seeing someone. And I believe that images are still important to human expression.
After all, I’ve still got thousands of slides to scan if I am going to get them into a format that will mean anything when I pass them on to my grandchildren.
Little by little, I have been scanning the slides into the computer so that the images can be stabilized and kept. It is a task of love, I guess. I doubt that it is something that our children or grandchildren would ever care to do. Roughly half of the photographic slides in our home are photographs that I have taken. The other half are photographs taken by our parents. They record some precious memories and reveal some important family history.
In the span of a single generation we have gone from black and white film photography to color digital photographs. That may not be completely accurate. The first commercially successful color process, the Lumière Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, went to market in 1907, before the birth of our parents. But color photography wasn’t common or very affordable for personal use until Kodak developed films and cameras for 35mm color photography in the late 1950’s - well into my lifetime.
At the time of the birth of our children, I was still using black and white film for about half of my photography. I processed the film myself in our basement and made my own prints from negatives using a rather simple enlarger in a makeshift dark room. I also processed my own color slides using the Ektachrome process. We also took many pictures using color negative film, but sent it to commercial labs for processing.
All of that is history now. While there are a few film photographers around, they are few and far between. Film is considered to be exotic and it is rare and expensive. I still have a few film cameras in my collection, but will be disposing of them soon and I haven’t used film for quite a few years now.
Film deteriorates, so the process of scanning the images into the computer is time sensitive. Most of the fading that has already occurred is easily corrected digitally and some of those old images are pretty good.
The new technology has radically changed how we think about and value photographs. Back in the late 1970’s we saved for film and processing for a big trip. I budgeted 72 frames per day, which was two rolls of film, for the time of the trip. That was considered to be extravagant and a very generous about of photography. From those 72 frames, most were processed into slides and shown by projecting them with a slide projector. A typical presentation was 140 slides. The projector I used had two sizes of carousels, 80 and 140 slides.
Today there is no limit on the number of pictures we can take. With my digital camera it isn’t at all uncommon for me to squeeze of a dozen frames and then delete 11 images to get just one. With my phone I will take a picture of a sign or some other item I want to remember for a few minutes and delete the photograph as soon as I get to a place where I can record the information in a more organized fashion.
My way of thinking about photographs has changed.
My grandchildren will never see photography the way I do. Their entire lives have been lived in a world where most phones have built-in cameras and people think nothing of sending a photograph to friends to show what they are doing at the moment. The hugely successful applications instagram and snapchat provide formats for automating the process of sharing digital images with friends.
Snapchat is particularly interesting to me though I don’t use the application myself. The basic concept, as I understand it, is to provide an instant visual message that can be viewed and then automatically discarded. A picture is no longer something that you keep or treasure, but rather a moment that is shared and then automatically deleted. Snap chatters don’t fill up the memory of their phones with thousands of images the way that I do.
Devaluing photographs so that they are viewed and quickly forgotten doesn’t just change the role of photographs in terms of single verses multiple viewing. It also changes how taking photographs is done. It is a completely instant process. Future generations will probably consider it strange that I go out in my boat in the darkness and wait until the light is just right to make a single image. You can already obtain inexpensive game cameras that take pictures without your having to be in the same place. The motion of the animal triggers the camera to record the image.
I’m confident, however, that photography as an art will remain. The options for altering images through the use of filters and other digital manipulations are truly amazing. I am no expert in photoshop, but I do find that spending some time editing my best photographs can yield some dramatic results. I can see how those who master the software and have a good eye for color balance and composition can employ the software as a form of artistic expression. There will still be plenty of places where images will be printed. In fact there are more options for printing photographs in different formats and sizes than was the case back in the days of film photography.
My grandson recently asked me whether or not the world had color back when Jesus was alive. Having seen old black and white photographs he assumed that color itself took time to develop and didn’t exist in prior generations. Most technologies that I see because they are new are practically invisible to him. He will discover artistic expression in media that I can’t even imagine. Still, there is something very powerful about seeing someone. And I believe that images are still important to human expression.
After all, I’ve still got thousands of slides to scan if I am going to get them into a format that will mean anything when I pass them on to my grandchildren.