An Irishman’s Diary on tales from the darkroom

Getting the picture in the pre-digital era

I recall a meeting of the NUJ in Belfast in 1972 where a newspaper photographer asked for a little credit from the self-important reporters.

“I’ve yet to hear of a photograph being phoned in,” he said.

Neither, back then, would he have heard of auto-focusing, let alone a camera with a wee screen on the back that showed you the picture taken. In those days newspaper offices had dark rooms that smelt of sodium thiosulphate, which is acrid and tangy.

When I first tried to be an amateur photographer I had to learn the technical competencies of extracting a roll of film without exposing it to the light and winding it onto a contraption that made the double helix look self-explanatory. It had two wheels with cogs brackets and ratchets arranged to swallow the film in a neat coil if you twisted each end in the proper alternating rhythm.

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I had then to steep this in two separate chemical mixes, and even at the end of that juggling didn’t know what I had until I had printed contacts – they are now called thumbnails – and examined them with a magnifying glass, previously having learnt to visualise a positive from a negative.

Creative technician

The photographer in those days was a creative technician. The end product, the projection of the negative onto light sensitive paper, and further steeping under a little brothel light, had to be proof that the photographer had a good eye, had caught something, had seen things imaginatively and had framed them well, in a composition.

That was the bit I liked.

When our editor scanned the first edition off the presses and praised a pic, he never said it was beautifully developed; he never sent for the negative or print so that he could smell it. He never asked to be allowed to handle the camera and marvel at its heft and sheen. He cared only about content and the caption.

And the caption was my job.

Demarcation

For, in the demarcation of responsibilities as defined by the National Union of Journalists, I was designated a reporter. I was not allowed to take pictures for the paper. I talked film speeds and lenses with the photographers I worked with but I would have caused a strike if I had presumed the right to take a picture for the paper.

Everything has changed about photography since then.

Now professionals can be laid off because everything is photographed. The men who killed Lee Rigby, a soldier at Woolwich Barracks in London, were able to, effectively, stage a press conference on the street because people turned up with their smartphones.

There was footage – hardly the word any more – broadcast on YouTube within an hour of the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

And though the photographers of 1972 couldn’t imagine a picture being phoned in, we can hardly imagine it being sent any other way. And we can also read the trend of evolution to see where photography is going, at least in the next five or 10 years.

Stills

The division between stills and video will end. Every stills photographer will just take a few seconds of video and pick out a frame to print. Already you can hear press photographers clicking off seven or eight shots with each press of the button. When that gets up to 30 or 40 shots, it will be video as we know it.

Pictures are getting bigger. My first digital camera, way back, it seems, at the beginning of recorded time, took pictures that were 2 megapixels in size, postcards really.

Soon the ordinary pocket compact will take pictures the size of billboards and we’ll be able to select a little crop from somewhere in that for a portrait or slice of action if we have computer screens big enough to view it on. Sports photographers will just photograph the whole pitch every time.

The close-up photograph will have microscopic detail and the skin of the fairest model will look like the surface of the moon.

And cameras will see in the dark.

And drones, unforeseen by Orwell, will hover over us, as likely controlled by the kid across the street as by the dark forces of the state.

All this progress is designed for me and people like me, providing us with ever more expensive options and bigger toys, and yet all I ever wanted was to catch an expression of a friend’s face, or a scenic landscape from Donegal to put above the fireplace.