From darkrooms to digital: Central Coast photojournalism

Film photography is having a moment.

I’m seeing wedding and sports photographers, who grew up in the era of digital photos and Instagram filters, buying film cameras and making the craft decision to devote some time with film grain instead of pixels.

One of my photographer friends is exploring infrared images and another shoots Polaroid film. Both have a soft edged quality that is gone with the sharp and saturated images of digital photos.

Usually the analog images ultimately end up being scanned into the digital realm. That’s how we share these days.

And often they will shoot a majority of their assignment on digital.

Analog film has a feeling that is different from digital imaging.

The tonal response to light and grain in the details, has a link to a handcrafted era, and it brings back memories to the early days of my career.

Technology shapes the images we produce.

When I started my career the then Telegram-Tribune, the darkroom had square tanks and film hangers for 4×5 film. There were also reels and drums for medium format and 35 mm film.

The trusty 4×5 Speed Graphic was an early journalism choice.

The camera was durable and the film, 4 inches by 5 inches in size, was large enough that it could be cropped heavily and still yield an image.

One professor said of the two-shot capacity film holders, “You had two chances. One to get the photo, one if you screwed up.”

Staff lists published of the Telegram-Tribune show at least two reporter/photographers in the 1950s when the first engraving machine was brought to San Luis Obispo.

There are even some black-and-white Polaroid prints in the archive, with pencil marks to show the composing department where to crop halftones.

Because the cameras were cumbersome, photos were usually set up and posed. Candid photos were very rare.

The next generation of cameras popular in journalism were the 2 1/4 inch medium format cameras delivered 12 square images per roll.

Easier to use, economical, more images and more portable it was a step forward.

And quickly those cameras were eclipsed by the 35 mm camera with 36+ exposures.

This portability and increased number of frames allowed the photographer to bring a camera more places and capture more candid situations. Lenses and film captured more information in low light and the storytelling world opened up.

There was less room for error with the small negatives and by 1963 the Telegram-Tribune hired their first full-time photographer Neil Norum.

Back then it was a skill to produce a correctly exposed, focused and composed image.

Equipment was, and still is expensive, but it wasn’t in the pocket of almost everyone.

Showing up, then and now, is the biggest factor in finding a storytelling image.

And with the cost of film and paper you weren’t allowed to spray a bunch of exposures at a subject and hope one was going to tell a story.

The paper was developing film on near daily basis until November 2001 — almost 40 years.

By the time my career began, the only film we developed was 35 mm Tri-X. Raw film came in bulk rolls of 100-feet, rolled into reusable cassettes of 36 images.

I don’t know how many shirts I ruined with fixer stains. It was usually a new shirt that got splashed with the acidic mix, and quickly a permanent yellow blotch would form.

For a time we had a mascot in the darkroom: a plastic oversized black widow spider.

It was scary the first time you saw it, but became commonplace because it never moved.

Until it did.

It would appear inside an enlarger, on a light switch or dangling from a thread, appearing to jump out from a paper safe.

That time was especially effective, since when you reached into the box for printing paper, only the red lights were on.

It was interesting to document which expletive was said by photographers when a giant spider jumped in the dark.

We spray-painted it gold and gave it to Tony Hertz when he retired from the Telegram-Tribune and went onto freelance photography and teaching.

When we transitioned to color film, we used a Noritsu film processor that didn’t require a darkened room, and scanned images after picking out the best negatives on a light table.

Our darkrooms became storage rooms.

And in a way that became the germ of an idea that generated Photos From the Vault.

We had two giant shelves filled with boxes of negatives, which over a dozen photographers had sweated to produce.

Just sitting there.

When we transitioned to digital cameras at the end of 2001 there was no looking back.

With the technology making sensors more sensitive, capturing more detail, a camera and a laptop are much preferred to film. Especially now in the digital age of information delivery where the deadline is now, not the next time the Goss Urbinite press is powered up and giant rolls of newsprint unspool.

Most cell phones capture far more pixels than my first digital camera, a Nikon D-1H.

We paid for the cost of the cameras with the savings on film and chemicals within two years.

And I never lost a shirt to chemical stains again.

And now today there are generations of photographers who have never had to search the floor in the dark for a reel of undeveloped film, knocked off the counter and rolled across the floor.

Old-timers have taken a peek at wet film to see if the image we wanted turned out or had our hearts broken when the image we hoped for was spoiled at the light-struck end of a roll of film.

Now people add the light-struck filter to digital images to bring artificial imperfections a faux hand made artifact instead of a predictable sterile digital image.

The velvety texture of old black-and-white film is wonderful, but I will never use it for a deadline assignment again.