Most
things have their advantages and their drawbacks. I have been involved
in photography since I was nine years old. I got my first camera in
1969 - a gift from my late father. It was a simple box-point-and-shoot
camera. It had two adjustments - for overcast skies and for direct sun.
No focus, fixed shutter speed and you could only buy one type of film
for it. But I loved it - and I still have the prints from that first
cassette of film.
The interesting thing about thinking back is,
that I basically snapped photos for the exact same reasons then as I do
now. I did it for fun and because I loved the world and wanted to hold
on to it and show other people what I found great about it.
Later,
when I was fourteen, I had bought myself a camera with better
opportunities. An Agfa with a focus ring, shutter speeds from 1 second
to 1/800 second, the possibility to buy all kinds of films and best of
all good optics - glass with space enough to use a big aperture in
order to let a lot of light into the camera. And I took lessons in
photography at the local school in the evening. I was taught how to
develop and print my own photographs. That opened a entirely new world
to me. Now I was able to control my expression from idea to framed
print on the wall.
Many were the evenings where I stood in a narrow room in the "red darkness" fiddling with films and chemicals, paper and trays.
I
can still remember the significant smell of the chemicals - actually
that makes me feel quite nostalgic. Nothing really compares with the
exitement coming from anxiously looking down into the developer-tray
with the white paper gradually showing more and more of your
photograph. Did it work all right? How good was it? Did I succeed in
producing a smashing photograph this time? Or would I have to do it all
over again?
But then, as I grew up and needed to find a flat of
my own, I couldn´t afford enough space to have a darkroom where I
lived. I tried to use the bathroom with black plastic-bags taped to the
windows and the equipment standing on the toilet with the lid down.
Didn´t work out in real life, though. It was too difficult to find and
unpack the stuff and then afterwards store it all again. And using a
rented darkroom also used by others never appealed to me. I need to
know exactly where things are in order to make a good workflow. So I
fell back into being a snap-shooter again. That´s allright - but not
really great. I lacked the control and exitement from the darkroom.
But
then came the digital age. Mid nineties. The pc replaced the darkroom
and I loved it. It was so much better - more possibilities, more of the
control I needed for my expression.
Photoshop was the name of
the game! Of course I knew that the decisive moment when pressing the
shutter-release was still the most important of it all - but that
hadn´t changed for a hundred years. The digi-thing was what brought me
back to photography full scale.
I haven´t set foot in a darkroom
for twenty years. But a few days ago I visited my local camera pusher,
and in a remote corner of the shop, he had a display of darkroom stuff.
The names of the boxes and equipment really made me think back.
Nostalgia took over - to the extent that I went home wanting to make a
diapositive film in photoshop.
Think I´ll have to visit a real darkroom again some time soon! I wonder if I can still remember how to do stuff in the old-fashioned way.