Article stats: Views: 814 Votes: 2 Average: 5.00 Added: 2007-04-24 | |
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May Adobe reign as ruler of the digital age: Photoshop is King!
Those of us who have become fully digital, certainly owe homage to that which has made us poor shooters into artists, at last. Of course, that bit was tongue-in-cheek, so don’t get excited yet.
This is a review of where we are coming from and to whence we hopefully go. Let’s start with film-based photography. If you think the multitude of filters, actions and tools in Photoshop is complicated, the age of chemistry and silver halides was virtual alchemy.
In days of yore, the average person took snaps that were processed and printed by someone else. Relatively few people were capable of processing and printing their own photographs. Advanced amateurs and professional photographers learned the techniques and carried the equipment that could produce images that could be made into big prints or placed in publications.
The average person did not want to carry around big heavy camera equipment, so consumer-level cameras had to be small and light and simple to operate. What the DIN, ASA or the current ISO rating was remained a mystery for the professionals to consider. Consumer cameras had fixed lenses with one f-stop value (the size of aperture or opening of the lens) and one or two shutter speeds. They also had a flash synchronization plug and a shutter setting for that, but the flash was an attachment that held an expendable bulb that fired only once. Just before the advent of electronic strobe flash, one could use flash cubes that contained four bulbs in one container that rotated to an unused bulb each time one bulb was fired.
These small cameras produced images that looked pretty good in a 3” by 5” snapshot. Sometimes, with a combination of luck and the right light conditions, a consumer could have a shot that was enlargeable to bigger sizes. Amateurs usually carried slightly bigger cameras using larger film and their results could be even better.
Film came in two basic varieties: Transparency (usually called slide film) and negative. The negative was generally used to make snapshots and prints. The transparency was intended to be projected for viewing. Of course, by various means a negative could be turned into a transparency and a transparency could be used to make a print; and one film was marketed that could produce both types with one exposure. Transparencies, by the nature of their being intended for projection, were also much used for magazine color reproduction.
The pros and better amateurs carried bigger cameras or more complex small cameras with interchangeable lenses, filters, a variety of films, tripods and monopods, light meters and flash guns.
There were a few things most photographers learned that continue to be true, although somewhat changed in nature. The bigger the film, the bigger the final image could be. The higher the number of the film rating in ...
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