As I approach the age of 60 years, I am starting to thing about what might become of my work when I am gone.
These boxes contain most of my film photography at The Ada News from 1988 to 1997.
Now, before you label me as one of those “back in my day” guys, you should know that I remain healthy and happy at my job as a news and sports photographer and staff writer.
But I thought about this extra hard recently because of two occurrences. 1. My young journalist friend Ashlynd visited my office recently, and we talked about the boxes and boxes and boxes of photographic negatives stored under the countertops here. 2. A fellow photographer came to visit recently with the goal of finding some photographic negatives from an event he photographed many years ago, and as a result, he brought down a big plastic tub full of three-ring binders full of negatives.
Neither my work nor his should be relegated to storage. In many cases, my shots were published once in the daily, then packed up neatly in Kodak boxes. That seemed like a sensible plan in the early years of my career. A few of these boxes stored over the period of a few months seemed entirely manageable. But as the years and decades rolled by, those boxes added up.
I certainly set aside many of my best negatives for contest and display, but the bulk of my work, thousands and thousands of images, sit in the dark.
I also think of the millions of images made by news photographers and reporters that might now be in the possession of newspaper/media companies long after their photographers aged out and retired or went to another paper. What plans to these understaffed media companies have for all those images?
I know it’s a lot to ponder, and I don’t know if I have a good answer. Would a historical society be interested in my negatives? Would a college library? The National Archives?
Or am I off base about this? Are the images we made and shared once in the daily newspaper or magazine simply a part of the process of living and being journalists? Have we done enough by witnessing life’s events and sharing them in print?
If you have ideas about the best way to preserve our legacies, I would love to hear them.
You can see the film era taper off abruptly in 2003 to 2005, a period during which I started relying much less on film and almost entirely on digital.
In this screenshot from the movie We Were Soldiers, a photographer makes pictures of a U.S. flag after the battle. 35mm news photography matured in the 1960s due in part to the demands of photographing the Vietnam War.
For my entire career photographing news and sports, I have thought again and again about doing more of my work on medium format film as a supplement to the day-to-day 35mm film product.
Medium format is a class of film sizes between 35mm and large format sheet film.
I tried it for a while in the 1990s with my Fujifilm GW670iii, and way back in the day at the Shawnee News-Star, with a Rolleiflex T and Mamiya C330.
I bought the Fujifilm in the early 1990s as kind of a “fine art” camera, but I also shot some news with it.
The Fuji was bulky, only had one focal length, made just 10 frames on a roll of 120 film, and created some fairly significant obstacles when shooting by not having a light meter in it, and by its skinny aperture and shutter dials mounted on the lens. In addition, it had a lot of plastic; I once had to send it away to fix the wind knob.
Rolleiflex T and Mamiya C330 were even more awkward to use with the waist-level viewfinder, which required a special skill set to shoot looking down into the viewfinder hood, where everything is reversed left-to-right.
Most 120 and other medium-format cameras have very cumbersome systems for loading film compared to the ease of 35mm.
But the good thing about these cameras is that the negatives I got from then were beautiful, with gorgeous detail and tonal qualities that 35mm never quite mastered.
One thing all these medium-format cameras have in common: by the time we got rid of them, they were garage-sale junk, but today are commanding very premium prices because they continue to get scarcer, and have found a niche with millenials, who seem willing to pay anything to be sometimes pretentiously edgy and/or nerdy.
I thought of this lately as I have been rewatching the amazing 10-part documentary The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, which features a lot of news photography.
The parts are chronological, and if you put the images in context with other cameras and photographers in the scene, there is a very obvious change in the number, and quality, in these images. As news photography matured, it moved inexorably toward 35mm.
The fact that there were more images available was due to the fact that 35mm rolls can be 36 exposures in length, where medium format’s longest rolls were, depending on the camera, 15 frames.
And better quality? Wait, Richard, don’t you get better pictures with large film? Yes, you do, but the process slows you down too much for covering news (which is also a reason digital took the market away from film.) In many ways, quality in news photography is the quality of being there and getting an image.
When I left the Shawnee News-Star I should have bought or borrowed those TLR’s from the News-Star. My hope is that some collector has those cameras, and my fear is that they, like thousands or millions of old, perfectly good, cameras are gather dust in the bottom of a closet somewhere, or rusting at the bottom of the dump.
This is my Nikon F3 with my rare and excellent 25-50mm f/4 on it. I sold it about 15 years ago, and kinda miss it ever since.
Some film is destined for greatness. Some is destined for the trash heap, but not without first being photographed.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked if I would consider writing about how to process your own film at home. I told her it was easier than she imagined.
In the business, processing film is called “souping,” and you “soup” film, and say, “it’s in the soup.”
To process your own film, black-and-white or color, you need…
• The film itself. This is becoming a scarce commodity, and freshly-manufactured film is getting very expensive.
• A darkroom or a dark bag, sometimes called a film changing bag. This is essentially a place to transfer your exposed film, in total darkness, onto a spiral reel (in the case of roll film) or a film holder (in the case of sheet film) before immersing your film in developer.
• Reels or holders, tanks, and a way to wash the film in running water. There are two kinds of reels: stainless steel reels, which are harder to use but easier to keep clean, and plastic reels, which are easier to use but tend to accumulate developer stains that are hard to remove and potentially contaminate the process.
• Chemicals. This item tends to be the most intimidating for beginners, since it can seem like alchemy or magic, but it’s not. Photographic chemicals require careful handling, but if you can read and understand basic instructions, using them isn’t any more difficult than making cookies.
• Black-and-white darkroom chemistry is the simplest, since it requires only a few steps, and is usually done at room temperature. The chemicals include developer, stop bath, fixer, and water for washing, and in our hard-water environment, a wetting agent like Kodak’s Photo-Flo.
• Color negative processing, called C-41, can seem more intimidating, but the number of steps for color negatives is the same. The main issue with color is the need to tightly control temperature, usually at approximately 100ºF. When I processed color all the time, my processing tanks sat in a bigger tank full of water with a temperature control unit in it, which automatically kept everything at 100º. The chemicals include developer, blix (a combinations of bleach and fixer) and stabilizer. Processing color slides can be more daunting because there are more steps (around 12, depending on who you ask), but the principals all remain the same.
• Putting film onto developing reels might be the hardest part of the process. You can practice using an exposed roll of film with the lights on, then practice with the lights off. Despite this, many photographers new to film will experience difficulty with this.
• Once your film is wound onto the developing reels, it should be placed, in total darkness, in the developer. Most film processing tanks have traps at the top that allow you to pour chemicals into and out of them while maintaining a seal against light. One way to work this is to place the film on the reel, put the reel in the tank, then pour developer in through the trap.
• Follow the instructions that came with your film or chemicals, or you can find good time and temperature recommendations here (link).
• After thoroughly washing your film, you’ll need a way to dry it. If you don’t have a dedicated film dryer, you can use a blow dryer on a medium setting, but be careful not to stir up too much dust. It will cling to the film and be difficult to remove later.
A note about chemicals: in my decades of processing film in various shared darkrooms, I can tell you that many people don’t realize how easy it is to contaminate chemicals with everything from other chemicals to food. Many people don’t seem to understand that clear liquids in photography might not be water. They get it on their fingers and transfer it to other containers or onto film, never with good results.
Over the years I experimented with all kinds of combinations of film and chemicals. Some of my favorite black-and-white films were Kodak Verichrome Pan Film (which was discontinued decades ago) and Ilford FP4. My favorite developers for black-and-white were Kodak HC-110 and Kodak D-76, and I had a soft spot in my heart for a fine-grained developer called Microdol-X.
Finally, I am of the opinion that if you scan your photographic negatives once you have them processed, they become digital photographs, somewhat rendering the idea of using film in the first place a moot point. If you really want to remain true to the roots of film photography, the final step almost has to be printing your images with an enlarger.
Increasingly rare and expensive, these rolls of Kodak color print film are currently out of a job, at least in my tool box, since I no longer have my own darkroom.
These are a few frames from the mountain of film negatives I shot over the years before the advent of digital imaging.
Brother and sister Deb and Robert Stinson pose in the Art Department at the University of Oklahoma in 1984.I photographed Debbie Mociolek in March 1982 at her request. She was killed in a car accident just two weeks later at the age of 19.My sister Nicole and her best friend Stacey pose with their Bruce Springsteen concert tickets in Dallas in September 1985.Scott AndersEn and I photographed our combined Nikon equipment in his dorm room in late 1984.Your host poses with Robert Stinson in my apartment in the early 1990s.Your host poses with Robert Stinson in my apartment in the early 1990s.Robert Stinson uses a tripod as we make pictures at my apartment in the early 1990s.Robert Stinson shows a photography student how to load the Nikon F4 with film.Robert throws up his hands as he and I make pictures in downtown Ada in the late 1990s.Robert uses the 75-300mm f/4.5 lens on his Nikon F4 camera.Robert uses a tripod to photograph a flowing river in the Talihina area in 1984.Robert poses in his father’s loft in Tulsa in the 1980s.Robert enjoys dinner in his rooming house just off the University of Oklahoma in 1985.Robert and I photograph a young model named Masha in my apartment in 1999.Robert and I photograph a young model named Masha in my apartment in 1999.You host shoots a “selfie” before the word “selfie” was invented.The author poses with the Ada High School Couganns dance team in the 1990s.Scott AndersEn poses on railroad tracks near him suburban Chicago home in 1987.Scott AndersEn washes his car at his suburban Chicago home in 1987.
I worked for a short time at The Daily Times in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1988, with a very talented young photographer named Harold Krewer. We often challenged each other to feature photo shoot-offs, and it raised us both up in quality, and it was very fun.
Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/1.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5
R.E. Stinson works in the Copeland Hall darkroom at the University of Oklahoma in 1984.
I worked in Student Publications at the University of Oklahoma in 1983, 1984, and early 1985, where I met some very talented artists and photographers, notable R. E. Stinson and Scott AndersEn, with whom I am friends to this day.
I photographed Melissa on a number of occasions, like this image in 1984. She was a natural in front of the camera, but she and I were never a good fit for a relationship. We made this image on a winter day when she came to OU with me from Oklahoma State, where she lived in the ZTA sorority house. I shot it on Kodak Plus-X Pan Film with my 105mm f/2.5, lit with a single flash into a reflector over my left shoulder.
We shared darkroom facilities at Copeland Hall in the School of Journalism. Because many student journalists shared the darkroom, it was frequently full. There were two small, light-tight rooms for film processing, and around a corner through a black curtain was the room with five enlargers in it. Only one of the enlargers, which you can see in the image above, had a color head on it, so if you wanted to use it, you waited in line or showed up in the middle of the night.
I talked about these days before (link), but I chose this entry to include my entire black-and-white portfolio from college.
Chemicals were often contaminated, since young photographers often didn’t understand the difference between developer and fixer, or why you can’t “back contaminate,” so I brought my own chemicals.
I frequently found myself mentoring pretty college girls, hoping to kindle some romance, and took a few out, though none of those efforts lasted.
I found I preferred working for the Sooner Yearbook rather than the OU Daily, thinking I was making higher-quality, longer-lasting work. I preferred Microdol-X film developer, with the idea that I was making sharper, finer-grained images.
I helped Liz Stocks process film and print on a couple of occasions. We went out once, to see The Breakfast Club in a theater.Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 28mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 28mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 28mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 50mm f/1.2Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 28mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/2.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 200mm f/4Photo by Richard R. Barron 28mm f/2.8
This is the tiny, filthy, smokey darkroom I shared with Ed Blochowiak at The Shawnee News-Star for two and a half years.
I was the swing-shift photographer at The Shawnee News-Star from November 1985 through April 1988. I was partnered with a talented former Vietnam Air Force member Ed Blochowiak. Between us we made some great images and won some awards. Ed spent his entire career at the News-Star, and, sadly, died just two months after retiring in October 2016.
Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 35mm f/2.0Photo by Richard R. Barron 24mm f/2.0Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 24mm f/2.0Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 24mm f/2.0Photo by Richard R. Barron 105mm f/1.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 300 mm f/4.5Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 180mm f/2.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 300mm f/4.5105mm f/1.8Photo by Richard R. Barron 24mm f/2.0
I had been at The Ada Evening News (now, The Ada News) just six weeks when I photographed the Ada Cougars winning their 15th state championship in December 1988 at Oklahoma State University’s Lewis Field.
Most of the action and trophy photos were published in the sports section that Sunday. I was looking through a box of black-and-white negatives from that month and decided to write my column about scanning film, and scan many of these images, which have not been published since that time.
Richard R. Barron | The Ada NewsRichard R. Barron | The Ada NewsRichard R. Barron | The Ada NewsRichard R. Barron | The Ada NewsRichard R. Barron | The Ada NewsRichard R. Barron | The Ada NewsRichard R. Barron | The Ada News
My ambitious young photographer friend Mac Crosby came by the office earlier this week, at my invitation, so I could lend her a Minolta X-700 and a couple of lenses, as well as a couple of antique 620 cameras. Readers might recall that Mac wrote a neat piece about my wife Abby and me for class last March (link).
Photographer Mac Crosby looks at some of the thousands of 4×5 negatives on file at my newspaper.
In recent months, Mac has been curating film photography into her body of work as an aspiring photojournalist, and that has included disposable cameras, 35mm film cameras, medium format cameras, and even toy cameras. Photography with toy cameras is sometimes called lomography.
One thing I showed her while she was here at the office is some of the thousands of 4×5-inch black-and-white negatives we have in our files at The Ada News.
4×5 negatives are about 15 times larger than 35mm film frames, so they potentially contain a tremendous amount of detail. In fact, 4×5 negatives are large enough that they can be printed as contact prints, in which the film is laid directly on the printing paper and exposed to light, skipping the step of putting the film in an enlarger.
I lent my friend and fellow photographer Mac Crosby this Minolta X-700, a 35mm film camera from the late 1980s. I hope she dazzles me with the results she gets with it.
If 35mm film is common and medium format film is exotic, 4×5 film is the Wild West of photography.
I’ve never owned a 4×5 camera. I do have a photographer friend, Robert in Tulsa, who has a Burke and James 4×5 field camera. A field camera differs from a view camera in that it uses a viewfinder instead of a focusing hood or cloth. If you have ever seen the movie Flags of Our Fathers, the character of Joe Rosenthal uses a 4×5 field camera to photograph the raising of the second U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.
As Mac and I talked about film photography, she said she’d like to see what I could do with film, and I pointed out that in the very office in which she sat were literally hundreds of thousands of film frames I made during my career, from when I started at The Ada News in October 1988 until about the middle of 2005, when I had enough digital cameras to get the job done, and when the film scanner of 1998 vintage finally died.
I also told Mac that if she gets a chance to use a darkroom in her travels or education, I’d be glad to tag along and throw in my expertise. I’d also extend that invitation to anyone who wants to learn about how a darkroom works. It’s pretty amazing that I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, but I can tell you exactly how to process a roll of film.
Three children use a water pump in this image made on 4×5 inch sheet film. The film is from an envelope marked, “Oakman Homecoming, Published Oct. 21, 1954, in weekly.” That means that the children in this image are in their 70s now.
The beautifully-made Canon AE-1 Program camera sits in my home studio recently.
A friend of mine recently asked me to look over an older film camera of his. He told me he had grown up making pictures with it. I I told him I would be happy to look it over, and to drop it by my office. I wasn’t surprised when the that camera showed up the next day was a Canon AE-1 Program, one of the most popular cameras ever made.
The battery for the Canon AE-1 Program sits inside a door on the front of the camera.
Before I go on, let me say that I’m not usually a “they don’t build them like they used to” guy, since technology has swept us away with all kinds of advancement, from the smartphone to the self-diagnosing car engine, but on this occasion, well… they just don’t build them like they used to.
The Canon AE-1 Program came from an era of rapid advancement in camera design, and includes some very advanced technology in it, but it also inherited the build quality, fit, and finish of the handmade and hand-assembled era of camera development.
The shutter speed dial can be set to program which, in combination with setting the aperture ring on the lens to “A” will allow the camera to set both shutter speed and aperture.
The AE-1 Program followed the AE-1, which was probably the most popular camera ever sold in the film era. The “Program” was a piece of tech that allowed the camera to pick both the shutter speed and the aperture, and was the first of that feature to be introduced.
In-hand, this camera has a big-camera feel. In contrast to almost any digital camera today, it is heavy. The corners and grips of the camera are fairly conventional, and the controls are laid out nicely. I can pick up a camera like this and immediately start using it.
The Canon 50mm f/1.8 is a great lens, but most 50mm lenses are. They are easy and cheap to make, and are capable of making great images.
I cleaned it up with a soft toothbrush and some canned air. It had a fair amount of back-of-the-closet dust on it. This particular one seemed to run just fine. The shutter and aperture cycled like they should. Focus on the 50mm f/1.8 lens, a fine piece of glass that every Canon owner had during that era, was smooth and accurate. The only thing I could find wrong with it was the light seals – the foam rubber in the slots on the film door – was dry and cracked, which could cause light leaks, especially in bright sunlight.
If my friend is willing to buy film then have it processed and scanned or printed, his Canon AE-1 Program is ready for the job.
The Canon AE-1 Program is shown with its lens removed.
In my last post, I talked about buying a nice used mirrorless camera and some adaptors so I could experiment with older lenses. It got me thinking about some of the very first images, and very first experiments, I tried.
I had a microscope as a kid, and spent a lot of time looking through it at everything from ants to onions. Photographing it with a homemade macro lens yielded very shallow depth of field.
Ignorance is bliss, and some of my most successful early photographic experiments wouldn’t have happened if an expert had told me why they wouldn’t work. One, for example, is one I tried with a garage-sale Exa camera of 1962 vintage. I was drawn to it by it’s beautifully-made all-metal Exacta removable / interchangeable lens. It was the only lens I had for it, but it occured to me as I watched how the focus mechanism moved the lens farther from the film to focus closer that if I could move it ever farther from the film, I could focus even closer.
Using my fingertips to hold the lens on the camera with a piece of cardboard toilet paper core between them required some patience.
In the world of photographic equipment, this is done with a device called an extension tube, which mounts between the camera and the lens. I didn’t have one, and I was 15, so the only money I had was a few bucks from mowing a few lawns, and my allowance. So I decided to put the cardboard core from a used-up toilet paper roll between the camera and the lens. It worked!
This spring of wheat grass grew in the pasture behind our house in Lawton when I lived there in the 1970s.
Most lenses aren’t designed to focus close, and neither was the 1960s-era Exacta. The images I got have a dream-like softness about them, and are loaded with vignetting, which is darkening of the edges of the frame. The vignetting was so dominant that my mother called the images “vignettes.”
Experimenting with the creative aspects of photography goes so far beyond camera and lens reviews and specifications. Sometimes I can get better, more interesting, more compelling images with a broken camera, a toy camera, or an ancient camera.
This tiny statue made of corn husks is a representation of my mother and her sister singing together, which was their favorite thing to do.
This 2001 Ilford FP-4 Plus film image of a mesa in northwestern New Mexico is an excellent example of the kind of tonal quality film can produce.
Sometimes when I remember events in my life from when I was younger, I wonder why I didn’t take as many photos as I imagine I should have. I am, after all, a professional photographer, and I should have been the one to document that ski trip in 1990, that nighttime glow-in-the-dark Frisbee game, that beautiful 105mm lens I sold.
So why didn’t I take all those pictures back in the film era?
It wasn’t like that back then. Digital photography, particularly smartphone photograph, has created the misperception that we all need a thousand photos of our lives every day, and if you aren’t photographing every meal and every sunset, you are a flip-phone neo-Luddite.
Shooting lots of frames equalled expensive processing, or in my case, laborious darkroom work. It’s easy to forget that one of digital photography’s most revolutionary aspects is its affordability. You can shoot 10 or 100 or a 1000 images, with very little added cost. Have you priced a roll of film and the price to get it developed lately? It was expensive in 1990, too.
I actually was taking a lot of pictures. If I shot 20 frames at a friend’s birthday party, his wife might have shot three frames with her point-and-shoot.
I often feel this way about the slim number of electives I took in high school. I see kids today active in sports, farm and ranch, yearbook, web development, cheer, and more, and wonder why I wasn’t. But, it wasn’t like that back then. My school allowed one non-academic elective, and for me, it was yearbook.
Before there was Lightroom, there was the light table, which allowed us to look at our film and edit it.
I want to marry these thoughts with a trend I have been observing recently…
There is a huge hipster/millenial move right now toward shooting film. I certainly find any efforts to amp our creativity to new levels very laudable. I don’t, however, think shooting film is the way I want to go, and here’s why…
If you are scanning your film to create a digital product, you are shooting digitally. The only way to shoot completely analog is to develop your film and print your film using an enlarger. Doing otherwise creates an unnecessary and wasteful step in creating a digital image.
Photographers are feeling out-competed by a crowded market, and want to step aside and be thought of as geniuses or magicians again. I feel this, too. Rank amateurs are learning to photograph the Milky Way by watching YouTube tutorials, taking that away from professionals.
When digital arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, it was the solution to all the problems we faced with film. With film, grain was obvious at even modest ISO settings, film stuck us with one ISO setting for each roll or film, film faced the possibility of accidental exposure ruining film or paper, film required a time-consuming process that created pollutants, film only allowed a limited ability to review images in the field (Polaroids) and and film had a higher-than-digital cost per frame.
Some photographers claim they like the “look” of film. But photographers almost always make some kind of “look” edit in software to their scanned film files, usually in a way they could do better with an original digital file.
This is a film scan from December 1999. At that time in our newspaper’s history, we were able to use color photos a couple of times a week, and they required a little bit of planning, so I at a basketball game I might shoot one roll of color film alongside eight rolls of black-and-white.
It’s absolutely true that I made many great images on photographic film during the first half of my career, but it is equally true that I heard many great songs on AM radio when I was growing up, but I haven’t tuned to an AM radio station to listen to music in 20 years.
I feel convinced that this hipster movement is just a fad. I’m certainly glad that someone out there is having fun with film, I am aware that there are reasons to keep film alive, and I am in possession of a number of great film cameras in good working order. But there are very few new film cameras being made, film is getting harder to obtain and more expensive, and when was the last time you used an enlarger to make prints in a real darkroom?
I made this black-and-white film image at Palo Duro Canyon in May 2002. It was one of the last times I shot film on a hiking trip.
If you feel like you are struggling creatively, maybe you don’t need either film or a new digital camera. Maybe you need to find a narrative. You need to take your imaging from technical recording to storytelling. You need to push the limits of fundamentals like light and composition. Nothing between your hands will inspire you as much as anything in your heart.
I bought a cheap knockoff of a “Lensball” last year, hoping it would bring something new to my imaging options. At $17, there’s really no down side to it.
Note: I wrote this here first, but used it as my June 1, 2019 column.
This was one of the first images I made at The Ada News in October 1988, shot with my Nikon FM2n and my 300mm f/4.5 ED-IF Nikkor at Hayes School. It ended up winning an Oklahoma Press Association award for feature photos.This is the page-sized process camera in the office directly below mine. It was once served by a dumbwaiter, and was made obsolete by the 1998 addition of an imagesetter.
I started at The Ada Evening News (The Ada News since 2012) October 24, 1988, 30 years ago today. In that time, a lot has changed, mostly for the good. A few notes…
In the 1980s and most of the 1990s, all my newspaper photography was on film, most of it black-and-white…
Most of those images were printed using a system invented in the 1950s, the Kodak Ektamatic processor, which used activator and stabilizer with papers that had developer incorporated into their emulsions, like Ektamatic SC, which…
…was a single-weight, fiber-based photographic paper offering very fast turnaround at the expense of quality and longevity. Although there are literally thousands of Ektamatic prints in within my reach as I write this, none are worth saving. Additionally, because the prints had only been stabilized, not washed and dried, they smelled like vinegar.
This is the Kodak Ektamatic processor in my darkroom at The Ada Evening News in 1989.I happen to think the Ada area is home to many great sports traditions, and for me, shooting celebrations and dejections is as important as shooting the action. In this image, Ada softballers Amory Morgan and Taryn Jack celebrate an extra-innings score at the Ada High Softball Complex in 2010.Sometimes sports photography, like sports itself, comes down to a few critical seconds. In this image from a February 2002 area playoff basketball game at Wilburton, Latta Panther players and fans celebrate a go-ahead score against Haworth with just 1.2 seconds remaining in the contest. Latta won the contest to advance to state.
When I first came to The Ada Evening News, we had no capability to reproduce four-color images on our own, and had to send images to an Oklahoma City first to have color separations made, so having a color photo in the paper was relegated to holidays and special events. In 1991, we inherited a primitive color separator (its software was stored on a microcassette), and could then have a color picture on Sunday.
A lot of more of my shooting in the film era involved flash photography for the simple reason that we couldn’t change ISO settings like we can today. I would shoot two or three assignments on one roll of film, usually T-Max 400.
The digital era began for me in 1998, when my newspaper bought a 35mm film scanner (a Nikon LS-2000) and a computer (an Apple PowerMac G3,) which had a floppy drive, and a Zip® disk drive, but only a CD-ROM, so I was unable to archive scanned images from that era. The editor during that period was too cheap to buy Zip disks for archiving, which was very seriously short-sighted,
though we still have the negatives on file.
I made this image of Boy Scouts presenting the colors at an Ada Cougars home football game at Norris Field in my first week at The Ada Evening News, in October 1988. It later placed in the Oklahoma Press Association’s Photo of the Year contest in the “character study” category.
It was around this time that my newspaper got its first imagesetter, a device that printed the page-sized negatives of newspaper content, replacing the downstairs process camera and fundamentally advancing our layout, design and publishing methods.
In 2000, I asked for and received a Minolta medium format film scanner, which I used as often as I could, but which gave poor color scans.
My first digital camera was the Nikon D1H, purchased by my newspaper in August 2001. Despite its 2.66 megapixel sensors, the D1H was a great addition to my toolbox, and despite having film cameras and scanners in my bag, digital became increasingly prevalent in my work. My last photographic negatives were made in 2005.
By the middle of the 2000s, the scanners we had slid into obsolescence due to their SCSI interfaces, which stopped being supported my modern operating systems. Although I could scan with USB-based flatbed scanners, I was never able to get a true high-resolution film scan again.
Since 2007 I have been teaching photography at the Pontotoc Technology Center, and I hope being a news photographer has made me a better teacher, and that teaching has made me a better news photographer.
If you lived in Ada in the spring of 2000, you remember when the mill burned in the middle of the night in downtown Ada, and how it smelled for a month afterwards.
We sold our press in 2012 or so, and began printing our product at our sister paper, The Norman Transcript, and delivering it by mail. With the departure of our press crew and our carriers, our building became mostly vacant. Portions of it were so poorly cared for that they are probably beyond rehabilitation, and will remain closed off and used as storage.
The Ada Cougars claim a state championship trophy at Owen Field at Oklahoma University in 1994. Since I have been at The Ada News, the Cougars have brought home five football championship trophies.
One of the best developments in these three decades has been my relationship with the community. While it’s true that bosses and coworkers have been unkind to me on occasion over the years, the public is overwhelmingly glad to see me, impressed with my work, and regards me as the face of The Ada News.
According to a count by a few long-lasting co-workers and me, in my time at our newspaper, there have been eight publishers and 14 managing editors.
Not all news is good, as in this image of a firefighter frustrated that he can’t get water to his hose during a snowstorm at the scene of a fatality house fire north of Ada in January 2010.
Two summers ago at Ada’s annual July 4 celebration in Wintersmith Park, I ran into a photographer who was shooting with a beautiful Mamiya C220. No one in town can process the film for it, so unless he has a darkroom, processing is an obstacle. He was the only person I’ve seen with a film camera in the field in the past few years.
I’ve got a fair share of film cameras sitting around, but I can’t think of a single reason to buy film for them.
For the entire first half of my career, I shot film, and though digital was fairly primitive when it came along, I embraced it, and have exactly no desire to go back to film. Fuji apparently agrees with me, though for a very different reason: profitability. It’s clear that companies can’t make money selling 20 rolls of film to 20 moody millennials who think film is “edgy” or “hip,” so the film game is over.
If I had my way (and/or a Kickstarter plan), I might be inclined to find a way to integrate digital photography into the millions of wonderful old film cameras we all own and relish, but I have no urge to shoot film with them. It’s pretty apparent that no one else does, either, because no one ever asks me to teach them anything about the darkroom or film, and I almost never see anyone shooting film in the field.
[stextbox id=’info’ caption=’The Shrinking World of Film…’]I came across my next door neighbors last night, and they had an old film camera with a broken-off rewind knob, so they couldn’t remove the film to have it processed. We picked at it with a pocket knife to no avail, and I went on with my chores. Even if they get the film out and take it to Wal Mart or Walgreens (the last places in town that say they can process film), those businesses no longer have actual C41 processors, and will need to send the film to Dallas or Los Angeles or Hong Kong to be processed. Like them, I am curious to see what’s on the film, but have no reason or desire to shoot any more film.[/stextbox]
But hey, if you think there is money to be made in making and selling black-and-white film, get some investors and make Fuji an offer for their Acros brand, or start your own. What’s that? Only a fool would try to make a living selling film in 2018? Ah.
Somebody handed me a four-pack of Kodak color negative film recently. Upon opening it up and taking the rolls out of their cans, it felt very familiar to handle them. I have a lot of latent knowledge from the early period of my career.
While it’s certainly true that I made many great images on Kodak’s P3200 film, and that it was head and shoulders above Tri-X for low-light venues, I have absolutely no desire to go back to using it.
Kodak Alaris, the film and paper division of the bankrupt Great Yellow Father, Kodak, announced recently the reintroduction of Kodak P3200 35mm film. I consider this an odd move – and probably a mistake – because this film, first introduced in the 1980s, was a solution to the problem that existing films weren’t adequate for very low light situations.
Even half a stop of underexposure in the shadows of a P3200 negative creates a very muddy image that’s hard to fix.
In 1985, I was working for the Associated Press and, by November, a newspaper, and with the inherent need to cover sports in very low light – football, basketball, volleyball – found myself trying to figure out all the schemes my fellow news shooters and I were using to get existing films to act with more sensitivity to low light. We shot Kodak’s Tri-X, a great film in the 1960s and 1970s, but long in the tooth by the 1980s. We used all sorts of tricks and schemes to get more sensitivity out of Tri-X, from snake oil products like Crone-C developer additive, to relatively obscure chemistry like Accu-Fine and Diafine, to time and temperature experiments with possibly my favorite black-and-white developer, HC-110. None of it got Tri-X above about ISO 2000.
Technology needed to step in, and Kodak needed to bring it.
Enter Kodak T-Max P3200, a very high speed film that could be “push processed” into the ISO stratosphere, which I did all the time. I used Kodak’s T-Max developer and regularly exposed this film at ISO 6400. It was a game-changer. For more than a decade, I relied on this film for imaging, especially sports, in all manner of low-light, almost-no-light venues.
Ada High School Couganns greet their team in the Ada Junior High gym in 1998, near the end of the film era. It’s a usable Kodak P3200 image, but compared to digital, it is grainy, contrasty, dusty, and expensive.
Then in 2001, my newspaper bought my first digital camera, a Nikon D1H. From almost exactly that day, my use of P3200 stopped. Color film lingered a while longer, but by the end of 2004, I was done with film.
My wife Abby likes to tell me that her photography was reinvented by digital, and she could finally express herself without the hassle of film – processing, printing, archiving, and especially paying for film and prints.
I, too, was very happy when I could leave film behind and shoot my low-light stuff digitally. Digital solved every problem with film: toxic silver-based chemicals, grainy images, time-consuming printing and/or scanning, and, possibly most significantly, a very limited number of frames.
Calvin basketball fans clamor for their kids at the state tournament in Oklahoma City in 1994. Kodak P3200 was a problem-solver then, but a solution looking for a problem today.
Sure, a good print or scan from a P3200 negative is good, but the same shot with a modern DSLR is amazing by comparison.
Also, think about what almost always happens to a film frame in the latter day: it gets scanned to make it digital, and from there makes its way to a print, a publication, or a web site. It does not get printed onto photographic paper using an enlarger, which, in the end, is the only true path to analog photography. Adding film to a digital workflow is like recording your phonograph albums to 8-track tape then ripping those tapes to MP3.
I can almost get interested in a super-low-ISO, super-fine-grained film for fine art, but on the grainy end? Did we not just spend a trillion dollars to get rid of grain and noise?
Also, if you thought dust on your digital sensor was a problem in the early 2000s, you are in for an unpleasant surprise: the cleanest negatives from the cleanest darkrooms have a ton of dust on them, and every speck shows up when you scan.
So what might Kodak be hoping with this move? To light a fire under a previously unknown revenue stream? To be the next big retro thing? To pander to the 1% of millennials who both regard film as edgy and retro and are actually willing to use it? Kodak certainly showed us how to navigate a corporate juggernaut right into the ground, and this idea seems like more of that same thinking.
I pulled a sleeve out of a file box from basketball I covered in March 1994, and found myself thinking about how slow and messy the film process is compared to digital.
