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Jul 17 2008

What ever did they do before digital

Posted by jeff in Image Processing

Every time a discussion of digital versus traditional photography comes around, the name Ansel Adams seems to come up.  Recently I was reading some comments from my post about photography books (which, by the way, had great opinions on each side of the issue).  Part of the discussion turned towards the post processing of images and of course you can’t mention post processing without Ansel coming up.  He was the master of his craft and his art lay as much in his skills in the darkroom as much as they did behind the camera.  The question though is, what did everyone else do?

I am pretty sure that there were many fantastic photographers who didn’t do their own post production work.  Why am I so sure?  Because there was a whole industry that was built around making photographers images look great.  Film processors, printers, retouching houses, and on and on.  Before the clone tool, there was the airbrush,  before the healing brush, there was the print and negative retoucher, before Epson, there was the printing technician.  All skilled craftsmen that help bring the creative camera work of the photographer to print and page.  So lest we forget that there was a time when the photographer was just photographer, not a photo finisher.

Post image by family_kloss

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 12:05 am and is filed under Image Processing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “What ever did they do before digital”
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  1. Ken says:
    July 17, 2008 at 9:12 am

    Hey Jeff,

    I like your blog, keep up the good work.

    Question: I have the D300 to and did the set up as suggested for “burst bracketing”. So far so good, however, when I load them into photomatrix software, somehow I am unable to achieve any close to the photos I see you produce…..

    Any suggestion to help do a better job in photomatrix?

    Ken

    Reply
  2. Mike says:
    July 17, 2008 at 12:23 pm

    Jeff: This post reminded me of back when I was a teenage sales clerk in the photography department of a department store, as well as a budding photographer. There was another clerk who worked part-time for us but full-time for the Air Force as a photo technician. He was the harshest judge and critic of my work I’ve ever met, but I learned a lot from him. One day I brought in a custom enlargement that I’d had done, retouched a little too, and from about ten feet away he looked up, said, ‘Hmph. They do sloppy work!’ and went back to his papers. Took me a long time to be able to see what he had merely glanced at. To this day I’m still grateful to Claude.

    Reply
  3. Luis Santos says:
    July 17, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    Although i am recent in taking pictures, i’ve always been fond to the art of photography, especially the art of post-processing. I remember taking a Graphic Arts class using an old Photo Mechanic Camera used for ads (i think that’s the translation from “camara foto mecánica” in spanish) and working with the chemicals and finishers to bring out that final image and thinking “wow, this is a whole craft in it by itself”. And you’re right, Ansel Adams was (to me, at least…. i am new ;) ) one of the best in post process. Although Digital post rocks, there is somthing about those chemicals and finishers that can never be replaced.

    Reply
  4. nzm says:
    July 17, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    I was a part of that age when I ran a Pro W&P processing lab for Kodak in New Zealand. Our airbrush, dye and paintbrush and negative retouchers would perform miracles each day, and there was a greater appreciation for a prolab because of these specialised skills. We worked very closely with our clients in order to achieve the desired results: our aim was to exceed expectations every time. Man, did we receive some challenges from photographers who should have known better!

    I was also involved in the switch to digital retouching from the manual “analog” techniques. It was an incredibly hard time to go through as we lost just about our entire art department in the downsizing. Losing people hurts. At the same time, we were excited about the possibilities of what could now be achieved. However, the challenges for the type of required artwork also increased as photographers further pushed the envelope, expecting miracles out of impossibilities, and being outraged at our charges. Their impression was that now we were performing the retouching as a digital process, it should be easier and the prices should decrease, yet their demands increased. I had to have a few stern words with some of them when suggesting that they look to fix up as much in the scene (hair, makeup, clothing etc), before clicking the shutter!

    The most difficult time was the transition period where we were retouching and printing digitally, but the photographers were still shooting on film. The negative scanning process was hell, laborious and slow, and created serious backlogs in our work processes. Thankfully that eased as more photographers switched to digital capture.

    Reply
  5. ansel-adams-fan says:
    July 18, 2008 at 6:27 am

    I sure like those Ansel Adams pictures! — regarding the darkroom thing: of course many people left the finishing to others, but I guess this was mainly the commercial photographers. I mean, if you are doing some run of the mill photography you can leave those details to others. But Ansel Adams was a creative artist and needed total control over everything. (Sure, he did commercial work too but in his heart he was always an Artist.)

    Reply
  6. Gareth says:
    July 18, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Hi Jeff,

    Great article. I took the liberty of taking your post as a starting point and expanded upon the general theme over on my blog:

    http://thecelticcamera.blogspot.com/2008/07/visionary-image-of-dreams.html

    Great blog, my man.

    Reply
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