phsc.ca

Slide courtesy of Gordon Brown’s talk January 2003

Toronto. Today, almost everyone has a smartphone that includes a sophisticated digital camera and editing apps. Stills, selfies, and videos are taken incessantly.

With some care, and little or no photographic skill, people capture a decent image. In fact, they don’t think twice about snapping off dozens of images – no cost and no delay to see the results. Bad shot? Trash it! Good shot? Email it!

It was nearly 90 years ago in 1931 (when Aldous Huxley wrote his book of the same title) that a roll of film often lasted amateurs – casual or serious – weeks. Cameras were mostly bulky affairs, films or plates were black and white (with the rare colour film/plate for the adventurous). Skill was needed to correctly select, frame, and expose a subject. Tripods were a necessity, not an add-on to show you were a serious photographer.

NB. I discovered Huxley’s works in the early 1960s reading “Brave New World” and a couple of his other novels. “Brave New World” seemed to be a fitting title for this post given the Herculean photographic transition from film to digital this century.

In the 1970s, Kodak experimented with digital cameras but the research was just that. Kodak made most of its profit from the sale of film and paper at the time. However; Kodak’s research into digital technology continued and for a time “Great Yellow Father” was a major factor in digital photographic technology.

By January 2003, when George Hunter first spoke to us on the topic of  “Tales of a Photographer“, professionals were beginning to scan and print. Digital cameras were still too low resolution and too expensive so many pros would shoot film and scan it allowing Photoshop technology to clean up the image and digital printers to create longer lasting prints.

On September 19th, 2007 we had the pleasure of hosting a talk by Gordon Brown called “Photography before computers and after digital“. Gordon was both a scientist and a photographer. He researched subjects for Kodak (like the T-Max name) and taught the ZONE System at the Ansel Adams school. His talk covered the history of digital photography from its beginnings in the laboratories of Kodak to the mid 2000s – spanning some thirty years. The above slide image is from his talk.

By March 2008, when Rob Skeoch (pronounced skew) spoke to us calling his talk  “Observations of a Large Format Photographer“, digital technology had made serious inroads over film. Sports photos, once worth hundreds of dollars a shot had fallen to $25 at most. Instead of a publication paying for a single slide chosen by the photographer to be mailed in; literally hundreds could be emailed to the editor and the editor, not the photographer, could and did pick and choose! Continue reading →