By Francis Moran
I have often said that my first job in this business was taking pictures, and it’s quite true. The very first money I made in the media-communications racket came from squinting through the viewfinder of a single-lens-reflex camera and capturing what I saw on a strip of plastic coated with a light-sensitive emulsion that was then run through a couple of baths of chemicals that turned the latent image in the emulsion into a visible image. Light was then projected through that image onto a different kind of light-sensitive medium, photographic paper, and a picture emerged.
It was — and, just barely, still is — a nearly magical process that has been an integral part of my life since before I can remember, thanks to a father who was also a keen shutterbug.
If all this means very little to you, chances are you were born after 1984, when Canon introduced the world’s first digital camera, and taking pictures is for you a cold and disposable affair of rearranging electronic bits on a piece of memory circuitry somewhere.
But for those of us for whom picture taking and print making are that warm, analog and ultimately high-fidelity alchemy between silver-halide and light, yesterday’s announcement by Eastman Kodak Company that it is discontinuing its 74-year old Kodachrome brand of camera film is another — and nearly the final — nail in the coffin of analog photography.
I have been an avid photographer ever since I grabbed my older brother’s little Instamatic and whipped off five or six frames before realising it had film in it. Man, did I get whupped for that. In high school, the year book editor, still a good pal notwithstanding, had to forcibly lock me out of his office because I’d use all the film stock he had. When I worked on the Halifax Daily News, I once overheard our parsimonious owner call up our film supplier to find out how much the masses of black-and-whilte film I had shot the day before actually cost him. (The paper bought its film in 500-foot rolls; the seven or eight 36-shot rolls I had used cost no more than a couple of bucks but he still thought it excessive.)
My older son, who studied photography as part of his fine arts courses at Canterbury High School this past semester, asked me if I had any black-and-white negatives he could use to practice his new-found darkroom techniques. He asked me in a tentative way that suggested he doubted that not even I, grizzled and ancient thought I might be to him, could possibly possess an artifact as old and archaic as a negative! I introduced him to to three very large Rubbermaid bins containing nothing but black-and-white negatives, and he happily selected a tidy shot of a container pier in Halifax that he promptly printed back to front.
My ability to crank through three or four rolls at one sitting when my two lads were so much smaller and so much cuter eventually drove me to buy my first digital. I traded in my top-of-the-line 35mm Nikon gear and bought what was then an advanced – and expensive — point-and-shoot. Every time I pick up that little digital and can’t wrap my hands around the lusciously ergonomic body of that Nikon F4 and manually rotate a lens into the precise focus and framing I’m seeking, I regret the trade.
BUT — I used some of my trade-in cash to also buy a new body for my medium-format film camera and when I want to take real pictures, like an iconic Seine River-framed view of Paris’s most recognised landmark or a sunset shot of the hill-top cathedral in Cobh in County Cork, Ireland, both pictured here, I load that sucker up with colour transparency film and go to town. I, and an ever-shrinking band of film fanatics, believe it is simply not possible to capture a real picture unless silver and other chemicals are involved.
In a terrible twist of irony, however, it is now impossible to make a print from a colour transparency — except through the garish Cibrachrome process that I have never liked — without going digital. Today, I must hand my transparencies over to Jim Lamont, a phenomenal print-maker and incredibly accomplished landscape photographer, who runs my trannies through a sophisticated drum scanner that creates massive 25-meg files from which he then painstakingly makes and frames flawless, gallery-quality prints for me that are weighing down the walls of my house.
Kodak is still making film, including the Ektachrome colour transparency I love so much, but I wonder for how much longer. Already, if I want some, I have to get it shipped to me from Montréal or Toronto because no-one in Ottawa stocks it any more. It will be a sad, sad day when it, too, goes the way of the Kodachrome, a faithful witness to history over eight decades.
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