It’s been 50 years since we put our last edition of the Northeastern News to bed. It’s a metaphoric term, I know, but if you have seen the typefaces all kerned into their wooden trays, yes, they do look like they are in bed. Newspaper printing technology has taken leaps and bounds since that time, and typesetting in wooden trays has been replaced by various digital means. Likewise, photography has evolved. Let’s take a look at these changes.

Someone broke into my dormitory room on Hemenway Street and stole my camera. I was forced to use the cameras that the News had at the time. Luckily, it had quite a stellar collection. The Mamiya C33 Pro was just such a camera.

It’s a twin-reflex camera patterned after the famous Rolleiflex and used the same 120/220 roll film. It produced images in the 2¼-inch square format, almost four times the size that came out of a 35mm camera.  This was an advantage, because a large image size promised a clearer, crisper image.

On the other hand, the twin-reflex design made the lens barrels relatively narrower than a 35mm camera. This constrained the amount of light entering the camera, and images tended to blur in low-light situations. So, it’s a tool better suited to outdoor use and can produce magnificent photographs given the right situations.

There was also a Crown Graphic Special 4×5 camera.  This was the classic press camera in the early half of the 20^th century, often used with a flash attachment and bulbs filled with magnesium filaments. These bulbs went off with a pop and a cloud of smoke.

It was completely impractical to use for everyday photography, but I would take it out on weekends to shoot street scenes. You had to load 4 inch by 5 inch sheet film into its carrier, one sheet on each side. You then inserted the carrier into the back of the camera, removed the shield covering the film, took the photo, replaced the shield, flipped the carrier around, and repeated. It’s a completely different mode of photography that, above all, made you think about composition before pressing that shutter release.

You might have noticed that the above cameras used film as the medium to capture images. Indeed, the first digital camera wouldn’t arrive until 1975, was the size of a bread box and wouldn’t become popular until the 1990s. So, all of my News film had to be processed with chemicals.

First, I’d open the film and load it into a development tank in a darkroom, then pour in a developer, gently agitate the tank for a prescribed period, pour out the developer, pour in a “stop” bath to halt the development, pour out the stop bath, pour in a “fixer” to help the image bond to the film, pour out the fixer and put the tank under running water for 10 to 20 minutes.  Phew, makes me tired just thinking about it! The wet film had to be squeegeed and hung up to dry. Here’s a link that details the process.

The News had a Beseler 45MX motorized enlarger for printing images from a negative onto photo-sensitive paper. The process is just as involved as film development, sometimes even more so. The print process is where you can employ various tricks to coax a good print out of marginal negatives. I estimate that of the entire photographic process, from pressing the shutter release to getting a finished print, 75% of the success depends on what happens in the darkroom.

Modern digital photography is a completely different game. Once released from film, negatives and all those chemicals, a photographer can keep on pressing the shutter with little concern for the time and cost of getting printable images. There are numerous types of cameras from which to choose. While professionals are still clinging to their DSLR (digital single lens reflex) cameras, consumers are migrating to a newer, mirrorless design. Mirrorless cameras are more compact, and they make less noise because there’s no heavy mirror that has to get out of the way of the light path when the shutter release is pressed and then snap back into place once the photograph has been taken. This lack of mirror motion also leads to a steadier camera, minimizing vibration that is a source of blurred images.

Once the images are taken, they can be processed with a computer application such as Adobe PhotoShop. These applications duplicate everything that was available in the darkrooms of yore, including tricks such as burning and dodging, broad ranges of lighting and color adjustments, and even corrections for camera lens distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting and perspective correction in both the vertical and horizontal planes. PhotoShop can also insert other images not originally in the photograph as taken, but that’s a whole different kind of journalism that is not what we are involved in.

Am I nostalgic about the type of photography that we had 50 years ago? I suppose somewhat for old time’s sake. I did enjoy my foray into Medium Format with the Mamiya C33 Pro, and Large Format with the Speed Graphic Special. 

I cannot imagine going back into the darkroom though!