LOOKING BACK AT SLIDES!

Last Thursday our office staff gathered around the conference room to view 35mm slides from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.  Throwback Thursday!  It wasn’t planned that way but it fits.  Several of us were old photographers that cut our teeth on film, not digital formats.  As the projector did its Kachunk, Kachunk to advance the slides, we naturally started talking about what it was like to shoot film, much to the amusement and sometimes surprise of the younger staff. 

Kachunk.

How many readers remember those days?  You would finish your roll of 24 or 36 shots and ship them off to the Kodak or another processing center.  Then the wait.  Maybe a week or two later the prints or slides would arrive in the mail.  Only then would you know how well they came out. Maybe they would be great.  But usually some would be out of focus or over/under exposed.  That was the way it was.  No instant feedback on your quality back then.

Kachunk.

There were also the different types of film to choose from.  Kodachrome, Echtachrome, etc. Each had their pluses and minuses.  Regardless of which film, each picture had a price.  Wasted shots were money down the drain.  The only solution was to be careful about composition and exposure. 

Kachunk.

We all have boxes of photos or slides.  Each box of slides labeled with the subject and dates (if we thought to write it down).  Packs of photos, hopefully with the negatives. Packs of negatives by themselves.  They are supposed to be stored in cool dry locations to preserve them. Most probably are not stored properly.

Kachunk.

The biggest change from the film to digital age I noticed wasn’t these things. It is the quality of the images and my perspective on good resolution.  Many slides were very good images that were what I considered to be sharp images at the time.  But years of shooting digital images with better equipment has changed my views.  What I considered years ago to be great images are now just good.  Or maybe only average.  It is not just digital versus film.  I noticed this same phenomenon as I look back at my digital images taken with older digital cameras. 

Kachunk.

My conclusion is that the quality of photography keeps advancing, just like the slides in the projector. Kachunk... Kachunk... Kachunk...