Photography

Waxing lyrical about a bygone era as algorithms run us over.

I read Craig Mod’s post, Photography, hello over the weekend with great interest. It is a lucid commentary on the evolution of disruptive tech in much the same way it did to painters. Photography as an art form has had greater number of hobbyists and purists than professionals. It stood out because they all understood what it takes to produce a great one. The iPhone may well be on its way to displace everything we know about this art today, that people would touch a part of the screen and be done — a triumph of machines and algorithms over skill. That future is already here, and with it, I think we’ve lost our will to appreciate and value a given photograph — not knowing if the image was manipulated using a computer algorithm or if it was the work of a skilled artist.

Thinking about this reminded me about my own humble beginnings with it. My family owned an Olympus OM-1, the all-mechanical, and full-manual SLR, and showed me how to use it. Together with a 50mm f/1.8 Seiko lens, the OM-1 had the look and feel of a professional instrument. I obviously couldn’t take real pictures as many as I liked because such an indulgence had a price tag. Film roles were not inexpensive, aside from the very long cycle for reviewing and cataloguing best settings.

Together with built-in light-metering, which helped find acceptable combinations, the advice for best results I was given remained hard-wired, and to this day it feels involuntary to deviate from.

Even with these combinations, three other things still influenced the resulting photograph:

1. Focus. The OM-1 required every shot to be focused.
2. Stability. Holding my breath momentarily helped steady my hand.
3. Film processing. People who did their own darkroom processing were yesterday’s nerds. I had no control over developing a film role, aside from the lack of motivation to do behind-the-scenes work and limited by the costs of setting an amateur lab. So, handing it to the lab and pray the photos would be better processed was what I mostly did.

I note these with a certain incredulity on how improved technology, with the auto-focus, image stabilizer and digital format and processing, has made them largely irrelevant today.

As for the ISO, the moment one chose a film type, the speed was pretty much a given, as can be seen above. Most preferred (and sold) films were those with ASA/ISO 100, because they worked with most lighting conditions. Also, once a film was loaded in to the camera, one would need to exhaust it before trying another with a different speed or carry another camera with a different film speed. For people and amateurs like myself on a shoestring, it wasn’t practicable. I remember buying Sakura and later Konica films. At affordable costs, they produced reasonably good results; we reserved Kodak films for special occasions.

The test of mettle came soon enough when my family decided that I photograph my aunt’s wedding. I was in high school, and I was given a tiny budget for film roles, which I was to use optimally. No longer a guest at the wedding, but tasked with cataloguing for the family without a professional backup was a great responsibility — a burden I didn’t feel at the time. Given our early morning and late rituals, I had to be ready with the gear on scene, ready to capture a moment, so my family could sit back and revisit long after the event.

With great expectations, and a fair bit of scepticism, I arrived with the OM-1 and two lenses, the standard 50mm, and a 200mm. And for the next three days, I had a blast. Like clockwork, getting ready for events, hauling my gear, and finding my way through the crowd in a traditional setting to get the spots is something I still remember well. Given the finite number of available exposures per film, I had to time manual-rewind, eject, and then reload in rapid succession to be ready for the next shot. I also grappled with flash’s readiness as the batteries wore on, losing precious moments, even though I carried three pairs of AAs on me.

We got those film roles processed at a well known photo film processor, and I chose the matte finish on which to be printed instead of the conventional gloss. Aside from a pat on the back from my family, we received unexpected praise from my aunt’s in-laws, who had generous words for the boy who took photos in their son’s wedding. To my luck, photographs turned out to be not only sharp and vivid — thanks to those great lenses, but I also realised I had maximised usage with 37 to 38 full exposures per role. Not one shaken was a bonus.

I took on a few more of such assignments in the following years before college, one of which was my cousin’s wedding, which produced similar results — I used the same gear and setup, all of which in turn earned me some goodwill, and which made me happy.

Those were the highs in my brief, unbound exercises in film photography. Post graduation, trying to get a career going took priority. With my abysmal pay as an apprentice engineer, photography looked like an indulgence I could no longer afford. And so, for years I could not bring myself to buy just any camera because the OM-1 set a benchmark that could not be matched with cheap cameras in the market. And I was repulsed by those I could afford.

The struggle to own a decent camera continued. It may sound like dire straits now, but for the first couple of years of our married life, we had no camera. Eventually though, wife and I did manage to purchase a point-and-shoot film based camera in 1999, which we could finally call our own. It was nothing like an SLR, but it was something we could afford.

The turn of the millennium was transformative, and we saw film photography give way to digital. In less than a couple of years, our first was out of date. The transformation was confusing, with insufficient understanding of new factors influencing photography. In 2002, we bought a Sony DCR-PC9E, a video and photo combo. For photos, with a sub-mega pixel size, it was clearly a mistake.

Then, in 2004, we bought Canon Powershot A80, our first usable digital camera — just before my second was born. I was impressed with its results, and more so from the minimum needed effort in producing a decent quality photograph, which could be reviewed instantly, aside from zero processing and maintenance costs. And in 2006, we bought Olympus C-70, another point and shoot camera, which featured RAW support, and it’s with us to-date. Most of our early days in Europe were taken with these two. In November 2008, the A80 was stolen from my jacket pocket in Vienna, and I still sulk about the 2GB worth of photos we lost as a result.

To replace the A80, we purchased Canon Powershot S90 in December 2009. The S90 came equipped with manual controls that were, uh, out of place with what I was used to in the OM-1. So, I used it just as I used the others. Nonetheless ten years after, I had a camera that had both manual and automatic options that I could use. It would, however, take another five years and my daughter’s hobby to rekindle interest to return to full manual mode.

Last year, seeing my older daughter’s interest in photography, we got her an EOS 700D, and she shoots largely in Aperture priority (Av) mode. Unlike the OM-1, the 700D to me is an as yet unfamiliar beast, and given the power of my glasses, the much loved viewfinder experience is largely impractical for me today. I still mostly use the S90, now in all manual, because that’s what I’m comfortable with. I no longer hold my breath, thanks to S90’s built-in image stabilizer; and I use its default auto-focus option.

The OM-1 is still around with my folks. Like a relic of the past; I think it still works just fine mechanically, lens aged, and some discolouration from exposure to moisture and humidity.