FROM DARKROOM TO DIGITAL

Things were very different back in the early 1980s, when I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft (now Australian Camera). Although the first digital camera had been shown in 1975 (by, incidentally, Kodak), the technology was still a long way from entering the world of everyday photography, where it’s become ubiquitous today. The first personal computers were on the horizon, but the first commercial dial-up Internet service was still a decade away.

Back then we wrote with typewriters and cut-and-paste editing involved scissors and glue – and a lot of ‘white-out’. We loaded our cameras with film, mostly Kodak’s Tri-X or Ilford’s Pan F, FP4 and HP5 for shooting in black and white, Kodachrome or Ektachrome for colour slides, and any of a number of colour negative films from Agfa, Fujifilm, Kodak or Konica when we planned to get them developed and printed by the local minilab. Those names have different connotations now.

Back then, photochemical darkrooms contained sinks,