Maybe I slept a little too long last night? Nah..couldnt be, but one things for sure, all of a sudden an era seems to have come and gone without so much as a by-your-leave.

Up until just last Friday, most of the photographers on the street seemed pretty much in agreement that, technology-wise, they had it made. But today I had the pleasure of chatting with a very young personality photographer who, toting his tiny HDV cam and custom-made mini-shotgun mike,  told me, straight faced, that carrying all those digitial still cameras, lenses and laptops was too cumbersome and a thing of the past. Ahhh, youth!!

Those of us who have been in the newspictures business for many years have seen tremendous technological change, nearly all for the better. Few photographers in their thirties knew the era of film and analogue pictures transmission and the woes it entailed. A young sports photographer we recently spoke with simply refused to believe that in the olden days photographers had to manually follow-focus soccer players and manually set the exposure. Surely everyone knows that all you have to do in order to get a high-speed internet connection is to hang out in your nearest MacDonalds or Starbucks right? After all, hasnt it ALWAYS been like that?

Well, I was rummaging through some boxes of old photo prints today and came across a picture I had taken in London at the royal wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981. There was nothing extraordinary about the image itself, but what made it interesting was that it came in the form of three 10 x 8 inch black and white prints of the same image, a colour separation. Each b&w print represented a colour: Yellow, Cyan, and Magenta. At one time converting a colour image to three black and white printers was the only way  to transmit a colour image (until both AP and UPI later developed a drum transmitter with a built in colour filter to handle the transmission of a colour print) .

It occurred to me that I had never seen this picture reassembled as a full colour image, save for a few newspaper clippings and so I decided to do this y means of today’s digital technology. I simply scanned the three prints and aligned them in Photoshop. The results were surprisingly good considering that the very long and tedious separation process (sometimes taking up to three hours for a single picture) was done totally by guesswork. AP, with a rather larger budget than UPI (for whom I was working at the time) had the luxury of a “densitometer” to calculate the tone of the three black and white printers., while we had to guestimate what the final colour project would look like at the receiving end. 

The amount of mobile gear needed to handle analogue colour transmissions on the road was enough to make the Rolling Stones roadies go on strike. A wire service photographer had to lift over a hundred kilos of gear on and off planes and spend hours locked in the darkest space available in many a god-foresaken place just in order to produce one colour project to satisfy the demands of the very few newspapers experimenting with colour at this time.

The equipment came in three or four large cases, One case contained a large plastic basin with hoses to connect to the hot and cold water taps in a hotel room. The basin was filled with warm water in which the stainless steel developing tanks were immersed. Another case contained an enlarger, film dryer and other printing material, including special registration frames and a special registration hole puncher, The last, and largest case, contained dozens of bottles of (very heavy) liquid chemistry (which would never be allowed on planes nowdays). This was all in addition to the photographers cameras, lenses, typewriter, analog picture transmitter and personal bag.

The separation process was finicky and frustrating with each of the three black and white renditions of the colour image having to be done one at a time. The first printer had to be dried very slowly to avoid shrinkage, then under the enlarger, matched and overlayed within a millimeter to the next, otherwise the picture would be out-of-register when reassembled. After several hours the photographer would appear, disheveled and cursing from the darkroom bearing the prized three printers. But even then, the hassles were far from over. Each of the three black and white printer took 15 minutes to transmit and with often noisy analogue telephone lines, many repeats would be required until all three printers had been successfully received. Quite often (invariably just as the only restaurant for miles was about to close for the night) the print would become loose on the transmitter drum or the adhesive registration marks would progressively peel off the print as the drum turned requiring the whole process to be repeated. 

But here we are heading for 2008 and it looks likely that pretty soon all we need to do our job will slip neatly into a large belt pouch.  Funnily enough sound, which for wire-service photographers all those years ago played such a big part in transmitting images as their pictures beep-beeped over those flaky phone lines as analogue noise, is back again. This time as live sound and commentary to the moving images we now produce as we adapt our product to the multimedia demands of the internet.

Rest assured, my colour separations have now been safely returned to a box in the cellar. No looking back. Hold on for the ride, its going to be fun!