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Scanning Around With Gene: Stuff I Miss About Photography
There are a lot of things to miss about old-school photography, including the small black-and-white advertisements from the back of photo magazines.
Written by Gene Gable on September 3, 2010
Categories: Camera Equipment, Graphics, Hardware, Photo Image Editing, Photography, Photography Equipment
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For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me a “junior darkroom” kit and taught me how to use it. Developing film and making prints was, to my dad, something that boys simply should know. My subsequent obsession with photography lasted into early adulthood, and even my father was ill-prepared for its intensity.
But these days I rarely take out the camera and haven’t been in a darkroom for at least 20 years.
A recent browse through several old photography magazines (1949 to 1957) reminded me that my interest in photography was probably less about art and more about stuff.
I really miss the commerce of it all. I’d spend hours poring through the pages of photography magazines, learning as much from the ads as I did from the articles. Here are just a few of the images that caught my eye during my recent return to their pages. Click on any picture for a larger version.
I miss the little canisters that 35mm film came in, especially when they were metal and had screw-on lids. I miss getting slides back in a small cardboard box, and I miss round carousel trays stacking up in the closet. I miss leaving a slide in the projector so long that it melted.
I miss safelights and the red glow they gave off, and I miss watching as a print faded up in the tray like magic. I miss the smell of fixer and the yellow stains you’d get on your fingers from the stop bath. I miss tongs and squeegees, and clothespins on strings to hang things from.
I miss those square black GraLab timers that clicked off the minutes and seconds and sounded with a jarring buzz. I miss paper safes and special lightproof packaging for film and paper. I miss beakers and thermometers and glass mixing rods. And I miss listening to the radio while I worked.
I miss focusing. I miss clicking through f-stops and knowing where each one was on the dial. I miss dodging and burning with light instead of icons. I miss anti-static brushes and Dust-Off in a can and special dryers to make your prints super glossy.
I miss Tri-X and Plus-X film, and I miss processing Panatomic X in Microdol developer for super-fine grain. I miss pushing film a stop or two. I miss trying to thread 35mm film onto reels in complete darkness. I miss putting my hands through the black cloth and elastic arms of a changing bag.
I miss choosing between glossy and matte, and I miss getting double prints, even of the bad ones. I miss contact sheets and glassine envelopes and the grease pencils that wrote on them. And I dearly miss loupes.
Go to page 2 for more photo history.
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Great article
Thanks for taking me back to those days.
And btw, D76 rules.
This makes me want to get my
This makes me want to get my old film camera out and shoot some "real" photos.
I miss it all too.
great post. Your words brought me right back to my days in the darkroom, I can almost smell the fixer.
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Ah, the smell of fixer...
I'm looking for a fixer-scented candle to light when I'm working in Photoshop or Lightroom... It's just not the same.
Lovely walk down memory lane, Gene. Thanks.
Doing it in the dark
I miss trying to determine which sheet of 4x5 film I was sliding into the holder for the Speed Graphic by feeling for the notches in the corner. Were they square? triangular? I forget. Remembering when after taking an exposure putting the slide back into the holder with the black side out, or was it the metallic side out, so I wouldn't make a double exposure. I forget. I never liked guide numbers for flash.
slide carousels
Hey, Gene, if you miss them, have I got a closet-full of slide carousels for you!
Real nostalgia can't be bottled
Thanks for the memories, Gene. Almost every note rang true for me, except that I had a room instead of a bathroom, so my sister wasn't inconvenienced.
After a disastrous beginning in which I ruined all my own Bar Mitzvah shots made with a Kodak Brownie and flashbulb attachment, a friend helped me learn the ropes. I made an enlarger from my dad's folding Kodak Tourist and a light bulb in a taped-on coffee can. I couldn't attach the clothes-pole column to a baseboard, so I clamped it at whatever height to the closet shelf, and projected on paper taped to a stool. Not long after I did get a used Federal "cool light" circular fluorescent bulb enlarger.
Over the next 20 or 30 years, as a professional, I acquired at least one of everything you might think of mentioning, in every format from 35mm to 8x10.
Now, after a break of many years, I'm gradually getting more serious about taking digital pictures that mean something to me like the few silver-based prints on my walls, and the printed and yet-to-be-printed ones in the basement.
BTW, there was disagreement among that sector of photographers who obsessed on eyeballing the grain in prints from 2 inches, instead of experiencing the photograph itself, about whether Panatomic-X gave sharper images when developed with a solvent developer like Kodak Microdol, which softened the edges of the silver grains as it made them smaller, versus non-solvent developers like Agfa Rodinal and Neofin Red, and slightly-solvent developers like Kodak D76. I think the jury's still out.
The best rule is "shoot at f:/8 and be there!"
Regards,
Peter Gold
This makes me want to get my
This makes me want to get my old film camera out and shoot some "real" photos. I miss sitting in total darkness for 1/2 hour or more to develop 4x5 film. Thanks for the memories, Gene.