You’re an old photographer if you can remember:
- The smell of a freshly opened canister of Kodachrome 135.
- When those canisters were made of aluminum and had screw-on tops.
- Having a bunch of those aluminum canisters in your camera bag to hold various small bits.
- Buying 35mm film in 100-foot rolls and loading the cassettes yourself.
- Trying to save even more money by buying the ends of 35mm motion picture negative film
- A 36-exposure long scratch on a roll of 135 film because you didn’t clean the felt cannister gate right.
- Trying to get 40 exposures in a 36-exposure cassette.
- FP flashbulbs
- Burning your fingers on flashbulbs when you were in a hurry.
- The fizzy crinkle sound that accompanied the pop of flashbulbs going off.
- Dipping clear flashbulbs to make blue ones.
- Going into the camera store and asking for “two bricks of CPS”.
- Calling it CPS long after it became VPS.
- Nikor reels.
- Using the cap to the Nikor tank to tilt it so you could pour in the first solution faster.
- The Kodak Rapid Color Processor.
- Cleaning the mesh in the Kodak RCP.
- Buying a third-party heater for the Kodak RCP.
- Exposing Ektachrome to a photoflood partway through the developing process.
- Dripping water from the reel onto the photoflood.
- Azo, Super XX, Portriga, Tech Pan, Agfa 25, D76, Dektol, Microdol, Pyro
- Printing-out paper.
- Changing bags
- Dust in changing bags
- Black spots on prints from dust in changing bags
- Getting the shutter and the body of a Hasselblad out of synch
- The tool that you used to cock the shutter to get the lens and the body on the same page.
- Seeing a print come up in the developer for the first time.
- Trying to see how many sheets of paper you could process at once.
- Uneven development because you tried to process too many sheets of paper at once.
- Using cotton balls in a contact printer for dodging.
- Making dodging wands out of cardboard and bicycle spokes.
- Being frustrated that you couldn’t dodge for longer than the base exposure.
- Aligning enlargers with mirrors.
- Light leaks in bellows.
- Flash-synch solenoids.
- The two-part control for the Speed Graphic focal plane shutter.
- Tripping the shutter with a button on the flash.
- Holes in your jeans from acetic acid.
- Thinking 28% acetic acid is for wimps; real ‘togs go for glacial.
- Going to dinner smelling like hypo.
- Pulling all-nighters to get the images out after a big event.
- The smell of the Polaroid print-coating goo.
- Getting the Polaroid print-coating goo all over your fingers.
- The first time you ever experienced an SLR with an instant-return mirror.
- Parallax corrections in camera with optical finders.
- Never getting the parallax corrections to work quite right.
- The sounds and smells when you mixed used Cibachrome chemicals together.
- Testing for dry-down with a microwave oven.
- Pin-registered negative carriers.
- Contrast reduction masks.
- Cross processing
- Chroma shifts when dodging and burning color prints.
- Thinking an enlarging computer would save paper.
- Finding out an enlarging computer doesn’t actually save paper.
- Cold light heads.
- The Oriental cold light head with contrast control filters built in.
- Changing your enlarger column to the wall to reduce vibration.
- Grain magnifiers.
- Speed Easels.
- Taping Speed Easels to the enlarge base for quantity production.
- Mortensen texture screens
- Standing on a concrete floor, reaching for the light switch with wet hands, and getting a shock.
- Ferrotyping tins.
- Printing wet negs.
- Spotting prints.
- Trying to develop prints bigger than your largest trays.
- Sinks with built-in temperature-controlled water baths.
- Sinks with dump troughs.
- In-line water filters.
- Sodium vapor safelights.
- Doing perspective correction by tilting the enlarging easel.
- Pin registered negative carriers.
- Making contrast reduction masks.
- Light meters with no batteries.
- Your first 3600 ws (or larger) strobe setup.
- Shooting 4×5 and 8×10 with pretty much the same collection of parts.
- Aero Infrared Ektachrome.
- Arguing about the Zone System.
- Temperature-sensing compensating development timers.
- Filtering you light meter so that it sorta matched the TX spectral sensitivity curve.
- Thinking that variable contrast paper was cheating.
- Split contrast burning with variable-contrast paper.
- Killing time waiting for the prints to wash.
- Bull sessions in gang darkrooms.
- Filth in gang darkrooms.
- Having a neg pop in the enlarger.
- Setting up two-projector slide shows.
- Trying to add a slide in the middle of a two-projector slide show.
- The transition to Estar for film base.
- Kodak Ready Loads
- Grafmatic film holders.
- Kodak Tri-X film packs.
- Bulb shutter releases
Well, I haven’t done all 94 of those but I’m aware of most of them. Got serious about photography about 50 years ago…
When I first started out I couldn’t always afford film, but I’d take out the old Argus (and lightmeter) and make compositions, calculate exposure, etc.
I still vividly remember my wife’s comments on the stains left by developer on my shirts and trousers. (Both plural.) And my efforts to determine printing timer using a handheld exposure meter. And some more, but I will leave it to somebody else to hit 100.
I recall most of them, not all. The ones relating to the darkroom I do not miss at all, though it seems that analog photography, eg film and wet darkroom work is staging a comeback. I cannot understand why, though I am also told that vinyl and tube amplifiers are also having a renaissance.
If I got paid at my former profession’s hourly rate for doing Zone System tests, I’d be a rich man.
Ah… those were the days, when it took days or weeks to know if what you photographed was superb or if it was completely ruined because of a seemingly minor exposure or processing error.
My favorite No. 40. That made me laugh. Yes ideas younger I would just type Lol.
I don’t miss the darkroom – but all the digital wizardry can’t get me the tonal beauty (and lack of grain) that my cold light head (and graded Oriental paper) got me, 50 years ago…..
I once did cibachrome myself; was very afraid of the toxic fluents… the same I was very cautious with selenium toner….
So many days and nights in the darkroom… and then the retouching of the dust spots…
I am very happy now with my HP Z3200 printers that exceed the result in almost every way…. and do the job in such a perfect manner while I drink my coffee. …and the colours are exact and stay much longer…