Portions of this entry are from my Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018 column in The Ada News.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

My young friend Mackenzee Crosby was just accepted to Oklahoma University and intends to go to journalism school. These events left me reminiscing about my own experiences at OU in the early 1980s.

My educational experiences as an instructor have reenforced what I have always believed, that education is very learner-defined, meaning that it depends very much on how motivated the student is to absorb what the instructor is offering.

College, by extension, isn’t as valuable as it could be because many people get through it just to get through it. On the occasions when I taught college, students were all over the place: lazy, excited, cynical, fun, bored, motivated, selfish, ambitious.

I will add that as the years have passed, a college degree is worth less. For a while the mantra was “you need a master’s degree,” and now it is, “you need a doctorate.”

In any case, I learned very little of my actual tradecraft from classes I took. The overwhelming majority of my skills came from my motivation to be a journalist: shooting, working in the darkroom, getting published in the yearbook and the student newspaper, and getting work from various media. I couldn’t wait until a journalism class was over so I could go do some journalism.

I had in mind during my college years that yearbook and magazine represented better quality than newspaper, so much of the time, I tried to get the sharpest and finest quality from my work, and preferred to sell it to glossy publications instead of dailies. Having been a newspaper intern in the summers of 1982 and 1983, I knew that newspaper photography was, as a fellow photographer said to me at the time, “meatball photography.”

I got to know several of my fellow student photographers well, but none more than Scott AndersEn and Robert Stinson, who remain close friends and respected fellow photographers to this day.

My film of choice was usually Kodak Tri-X rated at about ISO 250, souped in Kodak Microdol-X, using the 1:3 dilution, 75 degrees for 13 minutes, thought at the time to produce better grain and sharpness. I experimented with all kinds of products, but came back to those again and again.

I had three camera bodies, a Nikon FM, which I bought in January 1982, a Nikon FM2, which I got in 1983, and a Nikon FE2, bought in 1984 when a friend suggested it instead of another FM2. All of them had the MD-12 motor drive.

I had four lenses in my basic bag through college, a 28mm f/2.8 Nikkor, a 50mm f/1.2 Nikkor, a 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, and a 200mm f/4 Nikkor. The 105mm was my go-to favorite, since it was sharp, light, bright, and easy to use. Near the end of my college life I got a 55mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor.

I used the darkroom in Copeland Hall, which was shared by newspaper and yearbook students, and which was often quite a mess. Most photographers and dilettantes never understood that the chemicals – developer, fixer, stop bath, wetting agent – were anything other than water, and tended to spill them, contaminate them, use them up and not replace them. I became the de facto manager of the darkroom, and cleaned it all the time.

I had a crush on at least four of our Sooner Yearbook staffers, but no one on the Oklahoma Daily staff. I never dated any of them, though I certainly tried, and was mostly alone for my time in college.

I used all my own darkroom gear, including tanks, reels, and chemicals, since I could almost guarantee the other photographers would compromise the supplies in the darkroom. During finals week in an art class in 1983, I souped some slide film in the chemistry they provided, which had been contaminated, and which ruined my film, forcing an urgent reshoot.

Once, when I was walking home with my backpack stuffed with photo gear, I heard some frat turds yelling at me, “Hey, nurd!” Yeah, frat guys in college: a topic for another day.

At one point I dropped by The Tulsa World and showed some of my stuff to the managing editor, who kept asking, “You’re a student?”

In the fall of 1985, I got a call from The Shawnee News-Star, and started my career as a news photographer.

Periodically my photographer friends and I will talk about how much we miss film, particularly how much we miss certain cameras and lenses. Wouldn’t it be neat, we speculate, to get back into shooting film, if we only had a camera.

But, of course, film cameras are still around. I’ve got one in my hand as I write this.

I pulled the Pentax K1000 out of the display case in the entryway at our office. This camera is one of the most basic, simple, easy-to-use cameras ever. Its simplicity made it popular with photography teachers, since the camera is entirely manual, and required students to learn how to do everything.

I could shoot film right now if I wanted to, but the truth is, digital photography is overwhelmingly popular because it is overwhelmingly better than film. That wasn’t the case 15 years ago, but today, digital imaging technology has surpassed film tech in all respects.

So despite the fact that I have this perfectly-workable Pentax, I have no desire or intention to try to buy film, shoot it, and have it processed somewhere, then either print it or have it scanned.

We photographers are happy in our digital world, and despite Jonesing for the old days, we live in the new world of photography.

Readers of my social blog know that I recently moved from one office, formerly the darkroom, to another office, formerly composition, at work. I talked about the work it required and a bit of the history of my workplace. One aspect I didn’t explore much is how I make my work environment feel like home.

When I first arrived at The Ada News in late October 1988, I was fairly impressed with my new darkroom. Despite being neglected and mismanaged, it had originally been constructed by a skilled carpenter with a fair amount of foresight. The tops of the cabinets had overhangs in which ports were milled to hold real Kodak safelights, which for years held the standard type OC amber-colored safelight filters so familiar to every photographer who printed black-and-white images from film.

Readers might be curious why safelights were amber, and it’s because most black-and-white photographic paper is dichromatic, meaning it is sensitive to two colors, green and blue, but not red, so it could be safely handled (for reasonably short periods) under the amber safelights. The dichromatic properties were refined over the years in the form of multiple-contrast papers (Kodak called theirs Polycontrast, and Ilford called their Multigrade), which used two emulsions, one high contrast and one low contrast, so the photographer could control contrast by filtering out green or blue light. It worked pretty well, though some photographers, including me, felt that single-contrast papers offered an edge in tonal quality.

The countertops featured two extensions that held an enlarger and a paper processor, so the photographer could stand between them. When I first came to Ada, the enlarger was a ratty Omega D2 of 1960s vintage, which I replaced almost immediately with a Beseler 23CII.  The processor was the ubiquitous Kodak Ektamatic. Although the Ektamatic processor would ingest any paper with an developer-incorporated emulsion (meaning it had developer in it, so all it needed was to be “activated”), it was intended to use Ektamatic SC paper, a single-weight, fiber-based, developer-incorporated stock that came out of the processor in nine seconds after being activated and “stabilized” (not “fixed” like when you put most paper into the fixer tray) still damp and stinking of acetic acid, ready to be dumped on an editor’s desk and sent right to the production room. It was rough, but fast, which is what we needed for newspaper back then.

In 1991, my newspaper bought a used system for producing in-house color images for the daily, so I got a Road Warrior tank system for processing color film, and a Fujimoto enlarger with a dichroic color head for printing it. I was never as good at printing color as black-and-white, since I only made three or four color prints a week. Still, I could make a passable print, and it was fun.

Mention of 1991 bring us back to the subject of making my workspace feel like home. Starting less than a year after arriving in Ada, I began sticking photos on the walls and cabinets of my darkroom. By 1991, the walls were covered with everything from news and sports to images I thought expressed my fine art skills. But all was not well at our little newspaper. We had an editor no one liked, kind of a bully, who had no talent. A couple of reporters quit that spring. By July, I felt like I’d had enough, and told that editor, “I’m taking all the rest of my vacation starting today.” I went into my darkroom and ripped every print off the walls and threw them in the trash, left the building and drove to Tulsa, where I interviewed with The Tulsa Tribune. I was one of several experienced photographers applying for that job, and it was probably just as well I didn’t get it, since the Tribune closed just six months later. (Which brings up the question: why would you hire anyone if you are going out of business in six months?)

When I returned after my vacation, that editor must have seen that I’d cleaned out before I cleared out, because he was much nicer to me.

Over the years I’ve had many different images on those walls, and when it came time this winter to move out of the old darkroom, one thing I knew I wanted to do was make my new workspace as much like home as the old one was. In addition to quite a bit of cabinet and drawer space, my new office also has a large blue bulletin board that is covered with stains. Filling it with my images was twofold: it covered the stains, and it made the space into my space.