I Feel Old

What's so funny about this?

Above all, digital still seems recent to me. I mean, it's only been around for 22 years, in my life at least. I sometimes forget that a whole generation has been born and has grown up without experiencing cameras that don't instantly show what a picture looks like.

I was recently idly flipping through one of those web features that make you click "Next" to see a succession of pictures. The category was "Amusing Prom Photos." In a photo of a couple (above), probably from the '70s or '80s, the boy had his eyes closed. That appeared to be it. Curious, I turned to the caption to try to find out what was supposed to be amusing about the picture.

The caption writer assumed that the boy was "sleepy" and had closed his eyes on purpose. "He doesn’t like to play by anyone else’s rules," the writer opines—imputing motives with abandon—"and if he wants to shut his eyes, he’s going to shut his eyes." More explanation of tech from olden times was felt to be necessary: "This photograph was taken on a camera that didn’t immediately show what it looked like. Instead, they had to wait for the picture to be developed to discover that's the face he pulled on his and his date's very special prom night."

"The face he pulled"? The writeup didn't seem like it was meant to be ironic. The caption writer actually seemed unaware of the possibility that the boy had simply blinked as the exposure occurred and that no one was aware of it when it happened.

I'll fax it to you
Here's a guy making fun of an antique camera...and it's not even a film camera.

(The guy in the video, James Veitch, is the humorist who got famous giving TED Talks about talking back to spammers. Here's another one of his I had never seen before. Very funny.)

Another thing that's mostly of the past now...I ran across a comment recently that noted that redeye was something that "used to happen with old cameras." And come to think of it, I don't encounter much if any mention of redeye any more.

I wonder what other features of "old" photography that we take for granted are actually unfamiliar to the generation born after 1995? There must be more.

Mike
(Thanks to Brian Drinkwater)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Evans: "'I see beauty in the world'—pause, looking at scene—'When this guy moves, there'll be beauty in the world.' So true."

Steve Jacob: "I bought my first SLR in 1981. I bought my first digital camera in 1999. It's now 2019. I have officially been a digital photographer for longer than I was a film photographer. It just doesn't seem like it because time passes so much faster when you get older."

Tam: "To this day the sound of a motor drive on an SLR tickles a reflex in my hindbrain that says 'There must be a very serious pro photographer doing serious pro photographer things around here somewhere.'"

Roy Feldman: "I photographed for Ford Motor Co. for a few years and frequently photographed Bill Ford at podium speeches and auto reveals. Nicest man in the world, but he has a eye condition that causes him to rapidly blink and water after a few minutes of bright light. Knowing this I always over-shot everything on film with the knowledge that in three quarters of the pictures he would have closed eyes. Really happy when digital came along. Felt sorry for photojournalists who weren't aware of this 'feature' of Mr. Ford. Papers ended up using a lot of 'provided by Ford' (i.e., me) in their coverage."

Tommy Williams (partial comment): "Having to decide ahead of an outing whether you plan to make photos inside or outside—due to both color balance and film speed."

Dennis: "Running out of film!"

Tom: "Not long ago I was browsing around what was effectively a junk shop of old film cameras where a young woman was intent on purchasing a TLR. She'd narrowed it down to a Lubitel but the guy running the shop was not offering much guidance. I pitched in, pointing out she could probably find a decent light meter app for her phone. She looked puzzled. When I mentioned 12 exposures she looked shocked. I hope it worked out for her.

"Meanwhile, a young guy was asking how to set a film camera to black and white."

Clay Olmstead: "1. Reciprocity failure. 2. Always shooting with the same speed of film so you could judge the exposure based on light conditions without having to use the light meter. 3. Being the only person at a gathering with a camera."

Comments

[Kenneth Tanaka]

"I wonder what other features of "old" photography that we take for granted are actually unfamiliar to the generation born after 1995? There must be more."

How about the sound and feeling of disposable single-use flashbulbs crushing under your feet? Or, some years later, wastebaskets filled with spent disposable "flash cubes" at a wedding or other event?

[Dennis]

"I wonder what other features of "old" photography that we take for granted are actually unfamiliar to the generation born after 1995?"

Running out of film!

[bokeh]

I was just thinking about red eye the other day, it just doesn't happen any more.

[Stan B.]

Digital (not counting scanning) is three years old for me. And the thing most likely unfamiliar to the current generation is an editing process necessitating: an entire room with specialized equipment that must be light tight, access to running water, amounts of paper that treats trees as an unlimited resource, and the elimination of toxic chemicals into our local environment.

Now, every facet of editing can be done at our desk, and the toxic chemicals necessary for the technology mined in a "third world country" and then disposed of in a "third world country."

[Tommy Williams]

Some things I think of:

• The smell of the plastic 35mm film canisters
• The "joy" of grabbing a just-fired flash cube to switch it for a fresh one.
• Having to decide ahead of an outing whether you plan to make photos inside or outside--due to both color balance and film speed.

[Moose]

From my grandfather's extremely brief autobiography:

"I was born in a log house in the little town of Woodland, Utah. [Aug 6, 1889] My twin brother and I were the eight and ninth of a family of eleven children. We grew up on a ranch which later became almost a cattle ranch. I went to a grade school in Woodland, Summit County in which one teacher taught all eight grades. After finishing the eighth grade, I went to Provo, Utah for my high school and college work."

He likely didn't see a car until hitting his teens. He saw men land on the moon eleven years before his death.

[Joel Wolford]

Ya know..I hadn't really thought about it....ButI never have red-eye in my photos anymore....higher ISO's are good enough that I rarely use flash.

[Mike Plews]

Budgeting for vacation and figuring in both a handful of 36 exp K25 AND prepaid processing mailers.
Haven't even left the house and already anticipating a trip to the mailbox in a couple of weeks.
Chimping is not an improvement in my opinion.

[Mike S]

Or tearing open the foil protective bag holding a fresh roll of 35mm or 120 film with that odd chemical tang that wafted out.

[Mike S]

oops, delete that last about smelling new film, with more and more hipsters going to film, it's not a lost sensation, it's the new normal, in certain circles

[Tom Duffy]

Light leaks on your Verichrome Pan, drugstore developed, black and white pictures taken with the your free with a gas fill up 620 plastic camera.

[Oskar Ojala]

I can't think of single specific things since I seem not to hang out in the circles of photographers born after 1995, but based on surfing the Internet (remember that?) a few trends come to mind regarding the advancement of technology:

- Tech was a lot less sophisticated: 5 AF points were state of the art in the 90s, nobody in their right mind assumed a camera would focus in drive mode and matrix metering was a fancy feature.

- Cameras without light meters were common

- Primes were compact and lightweight (well ok they didn't perform like now, but pre-1980 build quality was great)

- Nobody talked about weather sealing

- The only economical way to video was using a largish (bad) to huge (good) camera that recorded to magnetic tapes of dubious quality and had to be rewound. Serious editing capabilities were expensive. DOF was very large. Most people didn't bother with video.

- Ever heard about slideshows?

- 4x6" machine prints being the medium that holiday pictures were being shown in (and they sucked compared to today's phones)

- ISO 800 was a practical maximum for color

- Black and white wasn't an effect

Some of the technical limitations give me a chuckle, particularly video has been a huge revolution due to advancements in computer technology and digital imaging. For producing results we're living in a time better than ever, but the downside is that one can't walk the street without someone pulling out their phone to record some mundane aspect of their lives. This brings out some vague memory of Susan Sontag mentioning how we keep recording our lives in the hopes of experiencing life. Also Martin Parr's photos on the banalities of mass tourism remind of more quiet times.

[Gordon Buck]

With older Canon cameras, there was a pre-flash intended to generate information for the main flash. Amazingly, some people have such quick reflexes that they blink on the pre-flash and have their eyes still closed during the main flash. This happened far too often. The solution was to turn off the pre-flash.

[Rod S.]

The ability to look at a photograph easily by walking over to the framed print on the wall, or by turning the pages of an album that resembles a book. Most photographs today are buried deep in phones or laptops and require lots of boring scrolling or searching through files to find.

[Tam]

To this day the sound of a motor drive on an SLR tickles a reflex in my hindbrain that says "There must be a very serious pro photographer doing serious pro photographer things around here somewhere."

[Tim Key]

I miss the sound of some camera shutters like my old canon a1. I’m sure I would know that sound anywhere. Sigh...

[Clay Olmstead]

Cupping the lens in the palm of your left hand, with your thumb to the left and fingers to the right. You could then adjust focus and f-stop with your left hand while bracing your left elbow against your rib cage, steadying the the camera enough to squeeze maybe one more stop out of the exposure.

Shooters trained on digital, with auto-ISO rising to nearly infinity, hold the lens with the thumb underneath, like a pirate holding a spyglass.

[Robert Roaldi]

I liked the feel of manual film advance levers.

Film photography was around before we were born but digital emerged during our lives, so they could never "feel" the same. Maybe that's why modern tech confuses us in a new way. VHS recorders came and went, floppies came and went, DVD players now cost less than a good lunch, but paper and pencil preceded us. This phenomenon of rapid change is not natural to us.

[Markus]

Re. the closed eyes: As a boy I was notorious for being photographed with closed eyes. Nobody asked, but the answer is simple - I could hear the shutter and before the flash blinded me, I had closed my eyes. I could imagine that the young man in that photograph had reacted in the same way...

[Scott]

Well, no one would notice the absence of something, but in olden times nobody ever talked about "bokeh."
On the other hand, there were lots of magazine articles on how to increase depth-of-field.
I guess folks who started photography in the last 20 years would think that weird.

[Bruce McL]

I think that digital camera photography as a hobby is headed to the same place that film camera photography is today. One data point - the digicam vs phone cam arguments in the forums have the same feel as the film vs digital arguments 20 years ago.

I predict that people born this year will have a lot of trouble operating a DSLR when they are 20 years old.

Another data point - there are 4 billion smartphones in use today.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/5/28/the-end-of-mobile

Why would someone who has never owned a digicam buy one when they could have a better smartphone, with a better camera, instead?

[Bear.]

Kodachrome was a film used to take pictures, not a song.

[Ramón Acosta]

I never experienced DOF problems with film. I set my camera to f5.6 and adjusted the speed. It seemed easier that way. I didn’t search for bokeh until digital came along.

[Anthony Shaughnessy]

I had a young man buy a picture from me on saturday at an art market. He then asked for advice on how to use his Nikon F65 film SLR. He wanted to know how to set the ISO speed. I couldn't figure out how to set it manually but explained to him the feature of DX-coded film canisters and that the camera would almost certainly just get it right automatically. He was also confused about how you work out correct exposure when you don't have live view and histogram.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Glossy prints.