Thursday, June 12, 2013

Last night I was looking for a picture.  Behind the box of comic books, residue of my misspent youth, I found our collection of photographs.  That is, I found the box that should have been our photographs.  It seems that many are somewhere else.  Everything is.  There was a picture album that was disintegrating from disuse with some 40 year old photos in it, and then there were dozens of photofinisher envelopes of negatives.  My first camera was, of course, a film camera.  A Kodak 110 and I shot many 12 and 24 exposure rolls through it.  The younger generation already thinks I am writing in a foreign language, but truth to tell, it was once tricky to get a good photograph with the lighting perfect and the subject smiling (assuming a people shot) and the figures balanced in the frame.  The uncertainty of it all was disturbing, and the cost was discouraging.  After dental school, I was strongly encouraged to get a 35mm. clinical camera with a 100mm. close focusing lens so I could take undistorted pictures of teeth and gums and things.  I bought a Minolta body with the lens and flash setup for clinical photography, but the beauty of an SLR is that you can change the lenses, and even could back then.  I got a telephoto zoom and a wide angle zoom and I began to take lots of photos.  At the time, clinical pictures were all 35mm. slides, so everything I took were slides.  Decent photography took a lot of time and patience to get the shutter speed and f-stop and depth of field and flash and film speed all working together to give predictable results.  My result was a carrying case with hundreds of slides of the places we’ve been and of the children growing up and the friends we’ve made through the years.  The case is still sitting here staring at me accusingly because it must know that I have committed time and again to transfer the images on the slides to a computer.  Clinical slides I gave up on long ago.  If I lecture now, it is on current topics and the slides are from a digital camera. I still have several carousels around of clinical slides, just waiting to hit the dumpster. The ease of digital photography has made us lazy, because pushing the button is free and it is easier to trust the automatic settings  and shoot a few extra pics you can review on the spot rather than use any photo expertise you may pretend to have.  And then I found the negatives.  After taking thousands of slides, I began to realize that to view them, you needed a slide projector and a screen and a dark room and an audience.  Individual printed-on-paper photographs could be enjoyed in the daylight by an individual person.  I began to have my photos printed a few years before the digital revolution, and thus the negatives.  You can, you see, scan the negatives and then with the tricky photo-processing software common today, convert the negatives to normal-colored images and save them on the computer along with the rest of your digital pictures.  Now not only do the slides stare at me unabashedly, but the negatives are beginning to look sullen as well. It really is time to get the proper equipment and, though it will likely take as long to scan them as it did to take them, just think of how much my heirs will enjoy looking though thousands of pictures on my hard drive of the future of people they don’t know and places they have never been.