How the picture has changed! - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Last week we turned up the page to July on the most recent calendar our daughter Christina gave us and there was a magnificent photo of the interior of the Palace of Versailles, taken by Chris herself.

 

In recent years, she usually gives us a gift of a calendar, featuring her photos. Though a teacher (now retired), she loves photography and often her calendar features birds, animals and scenery taken around Stratford, her current home. While most photos today are taken on cellphones, she has spent the money to get a top-notch camera with all the associated lenses.
How things have changed when it comes to photography. I took Journalism at Ryerson Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University) and helped publish a five-days-a-week newspaper, but I was only trained to report and write.

 

In the summer of 1967, I took a summer job with A.Y. McLean, then the long-term publisher of the Huron Expositor from Seaforth. Still printed on their own flat-bed press, the newspapers’ photos were taken by a local photographer and sometimes I was sent to nearby Clinton where the photos were scanned and plastic engravings were made which, after being mounted on wooden blocks, were inserted into the stories set in lead type.

 

Andy had decided it was time to change. He bought a twin-lens camera with two-and-a-quarter-inch negatives, but nobody knew how to use it. One day, he handed me the camera and told me to go out and find out how to use it.

 

I had only had box, fixed-focus cameras previously. This camera had various settings for times the lens would stay open and different  focal-lengths.

 

Mystified, I consulted an amateur photographer I’d attended high school with, who, over several lessons, showed me how to use the camera. I went back to The Expositor and taught others how to take photos with it.

 

Back at school, I saved up money and went out and bought a 35-mm. single-lens camera. I learned how to develop film and how to print photos. By the time I became editor of the Clinton News-Record in January of 1970, I was comfortable doing all parts of photography. We were printing offset by then and used many more photos than in the letter-press days.

 

Later, after Jill and I bought The Blyth Standard, and after my brief flirtation with theatre, we started The Citizen and we shot rolls and rolls of photographs for each edition. I remember assistant editor, Toby Rainey, spending hours in the darkroom, developing film and printing photos.

 

How things have changed. The coming of digital photography meant no time was used up in the darkroom - in fact we didn’t even need a darkroom.

 

As cellphones became more useful, they also became cameras, with the quality of photos becoming better and better over the years. People who seldom took photos when film was used suddenly could take photos of everything - and did. What they didn’t often do was print those photos. Photos often used to be a look into our past. Will they survive when they only exist on our phones?

 

Meanwhile, the photos from those old film cameras can’t be printed anymore, as you see in those pages of photos from the past in The Citizen where pictures from old newspapers are scanned in and are less sharply printed than when they were originally used.

 

Along the way as Christina became more sophisticated in photography, I went the other direction. Since retirement, I hardly ever take photos. I never bought a modern cellphone and, although I got a good camera when I retired, it is so automated I forgot how to use it. So while my daughter takes calendar shots (and prints them), I don’t use my camera. When we saw a mother deer and her two fawns in our backyard, I felt no urge to record the moment.

 

So, what is the future of photography? Will we spend more and more time taking pictures but so seldom print them, or save them, so we have no record of our lives or the communities around us?

 

It’s strange that while we have several albums full of prints of photos taken from the early days before we got married or when our kids were young, we seldom have pictures from more recent years. However, when our daughters send electronic photos of their children, I do often print them from our computer and Jill features them on the kitchen refrigerator.

 

Photography has progressed in surprising ways. Until 150 years or so ago, there were no records of what our ancestors looked like, but then professional photographers opened studios to take portraits. Box cameras were invented and became popular where we could shoot our own photos. Now, with digital photography and phone cameras, we can, and do, take thousands of pictures, but seldom print them. How could we explain this if men from space visited us?