You’re an old photographer if you can remember…

You’re an old photographer if you can remember:

1. The smell of a freshly opened canister of Kodachrome 135.
2. When those canisters were made of aluminum and had screw-on tops.
3. Having a bunch of those aluminum canisters in your camera bag to hold various small bits.
4. Buying 35mm film in 100-foot rolls and loading the cassettes yourself.
5. Trying to save even more money by buying the ends of 35mm motion picture negative film
6. A 36-exposure long scratch on a roll of 135 film because you didn’t clean the felt cannister gate right.
7. Trying to get 40 exposures in a 36-exposure cassette.
8. FP flashbulbs
9. Burning your fingers on flashbulbs when you were in a hurry.
10. The fizzy crinkle sound that accompanied the pop of flashbulbs going off.
11. Dipping clear flashbulbs to make blue ones.
12. Going into the camera store and asking for “two bricks of CPS”.
13. Calling it CPS long after it became VPS.
14. Nikor reels.
15. Using the cap to the Nikor tank to tilt it so you could pour in the first solution faster.
16. The Kodak Rapid Color Processor.
17. Cleaning the mesh in the Kodak RCP.
18. Buying a third-party heater for the Kodak RCP.
19. Exposing Ektachrome to a photoflood partway through the developing process.
20. Dripping water from the reel onto the photoflood.
21. Azo, Super XX, Portriga, Tech Pan, Agfa 25, D76, Dektol, Microdol, Pyro
22. Printing-out paper.
23. Changing bags
24. Dust in changing bags
25. Black spots on prints from dust in changing bags
26. Getting the shutter and the body of a Hasselblad out of synch
27. The tool that you used to cock the shutter to get the lens and the body on the same page.
28. Seeing a print come up in the developer for the first time.
29. Trying to see how many sheets of paper you could process at once.
30. Uneven development because you tried to process too many sheets of paper at once.
31. Using cotton balls in a contact printer for dodging.
32. Making dodging wands out of cardboard and bicycle spokes.
33. Being frustrated that you couldn’t dodge for longer than the base exposure.
34. Aligning enlargers with mirrors.
35. Light leaks in bellows.
36. Flash-synch solenoids.
37. The two-part control for the Speed Graphic focal plane shutter.
38. Tripping the shutter with a button on the flash.
39. Holes in your jeans from acetic acid.
40. Thinking 28% acetic acid is for wimps; real ‘togs go for glacial.
41. Going to dinner smelling like hypo.
42. Pulling all-nighters to get the images out after a big event.
43. The smell of the Polaroid print-coating goo.
44. Getting the Polaroid print-coating goo all over your fingers.
45. The first time you ever experienced an SLR with an instant-return mirror.
46. Parallax corrections in camera with optical finders.
47. Never getting the parallax corrections to work quite right.
48. The sounds and smells when you mixed used Cibachrome chemicals together.
49. Testing for dry-down with a microwave oven.
50. Pin-registered negative carriers.
51. Contrast reduction masks.
52. Cross processing
53. Chroma shifts when dodging and burning color prints.
54. Thinking an enlarging computer would save paper.
55. Finding out an enlarging computer doesn’t actually save paper.
56. Cold light heads.
57. The Oriental cold light head with contrast control filters built in.
58. Changing your enlarger column to the wall to reduce vibration.
59. Grain magnifiers.
60. Speed Easels.
61. Taping Speed Easels to the enlarge base for quantity production.
62. Mortensen texture screens
63. Standing on a concrete floor, reaching for the light switch with wet hands, and getting a shock.
64. Ferrotyping tins.
65. Printing wet negs.
66. Spotting prints.
67. Trying to develop prints bigger than your largest trays.
68. Sinks with built-in temperature-controlled water baths.
69. Sinks with dump troughs.
70. In-line water filters.
71. Sodium vapor safelights.
72. Doing perspective correction by tilting the enlarging easel.
73. Pin registered negative carriers.
74. Making contrast reduction masks.
75. Light meters with no batteries.
76. Your first 3600 ws (or larger) strobe setup.
77. Shooting 4×5 and 8×10 with pretty much the same collection of parts.
78. Aero Infrared Ektachrome.
79. Arguing about the Zone System.
80. Temperature-sensing compensating development timers.
81. Filtering you light meter so that it sorta matched the TX spectral sensitivity curve.
82. Thinking that variable contrast paper was cheating.
83. Split contrast burning with variable-contrast paper.
84. Killing time waiting for the prints to wash.
85. Bull sessions in gang darkrooms.
86. Filth in gang darkrooms.
87. Having a neg pop in the enlarger.
88. Setting up two-projector slide shows.
89. Trying to add a slide in the middle of a two-projector slide show.
90. The transition to Estar for film base.
91. Kodak Ready Loads
92. Grafmatic film holders.
93. Kodak Tri-X film packs.
94. Bulb shutter releases