My Love of Photography, Pt. 1
Can I just say that I miss old school photography?
As I sit and write this, I realize that I have grown up during the transition from film photography to digital photography. My senior year of high school was the last year we used the darkroom for the newspaper, magazine, and yearbook. It was replaced the next year by a negative scanner, which was quickly replaced by the digital camera.
Even with the benefits of the digital camera, I can’t help but reminisce about the "good ol’ days" of photography. I remember my first camera, it was my Dad’s Minolta XG-M 35 mm camera. It was a pretty decent camera and my Dad had three lenses: the one that came with it, a wide angle lens, and a telephoto zoom lens. I was very lucky to have it.
I remember my first photography class at North Central High School with Jenny. Even on our first day, she had us put a fresh roll of Ilford film in our cameras and took us outside to take pictures. Little did I know just how much photography would become a part of my life.
A lot of work goes into film photography. Back in high school I was rushed with deadlines for the school magazine and became pretty efficient at shooting a roll of film, developing the roll, and printing the pictures in a pretty efficient fashion. That was work. But what I loved were the times when I was able to take my time, really work on my photography, and come up with truly awesome images. I must also remind you that unlike today’s digital cameras which can store hundreds of images on a single memory card, I was limited by 24 or 36 frames, depending on the roll I was shooting.
Film photography truly is an art and a science. The shooting of pictures was the art, while the chemicals and timing was the science. I still remember room J201 where I had to take the time to mix chemicals: developer, stop bath, and fixer… just to name a few.
I was always excited to get my roll of film back to school and develop it, because unlike digital photography, I didn’t get to see instantaneously what the image looked like. Sometimes I’d wonder if I overexposed a shot, or didn’t have enough light. I’d throw the film canister, can opener, film reel, and a film developing tank into a changing bag and zip it up. For those of you who don’t know, a changing bag is a bag with sleeves so that the photographer can open the film canister, put it on a film reel, and seal it in the developer tank. This is all done in complete darkness so that the film isn’t exposed to light.
Developing the roll isn’t too special, it’s a process of pouring in chemicals that will develop the image on the negative, another chemical stops the developing process, and another chemical makes the image permanent.
This was always my favorite part because looking at the negatives, I had a pretty good idea of how my pictures turned out. If frames in the negative were too light, I could tell that I had underexposed and the image would be too dark. If frames in the negative were too dark, I knew that resulting image would be too light. The best way to find out if I shot a good roll would be to cut the film, put it in a negative sleeve, and take it into the darkroom. Once I did that, I could put the negatives against a sheet of photo paper, expose it to light for a few seconds, and have a contact sheet to look at. And that was when the fun was getting started…