Digital

I've Gone Digital!

By Sue Fagalde Lick

Over the past few weeks, I have taken pictures

of my shoes, my dinner, my calendar, and so

many shots of the dog she has learned to smile

when I raise my camera. Why all the photo

action? I don't have to worry any more about

wasting film. I have finally purchased a digital

camera.

What a change. No more waiting two weeks to

get my pictures back. My new camera fits in the

palm of my hand and can do more things than

my whole case of heavy Minolta gear ever could.

I'm still amazed that I can take a picture and

look at it immediately. If I don't like it, poof, I hit

the little garbage can button, and it goes away.

If I want to save it, I hook up the camera to my

computer and there it is on the screen. If it's too

dark, I can brighten it up. If the people have red

eyes, I can take the red out. If the picture

contains background elements I don't want,

I can crop them out. Incredible.

Perhaps some readers assume all this is perfectly normal. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, cameras were very large and did not contain computer chips. Around 1960, I started with a Kodak Brownie, a big plastic square that clicked out black and white photos that often came with fluted edges like a pie. If the setting did not have enough light on its own, I put little light bulbs into an opening at the top of the camera. Flash, and the bulb turned black. As soon as it cooled down, I would throw the bulb away and put in another. When the 10 or so pictures on the roll were taken, I wound up the film with a hand winder, opened the camera in a dark closet, sealed the paper end over the film and took it to the drugstore, where, in a week or so, I could pick up my pictures.

In college, I borrowed a "professional" camera, a heavy black rectangular machine in which I looked down into a window on the top to view the photo I was about to shoot. I ran around the campus gathering pictures of people and flowers and buildings on film almost as wide as my whole new camera.

"bracket our shots," which meant to shoot them at several different settings so that at least one would be properly exposed. What you shot was what you got, and you wouldn't know until you were pulling the picture out of the developer in the darkroom, staring at it in the red light. Is it dark enough? Is there enough contrast?

And that was only black and white. Color took expert juggling of temperatures and chemicals and the right amount of blue, red and yellow. Most of us didn't even attempt it.

I enjoyed my darkroom time--

after my trial by fire. When I

interviewed to work at the

Gilroy Dispatch in 1975, I told

them I knew photography and

that of course I was adept in

the darkroom. Actually, I had

had just one class session

and didn't know diddly. I

produced an endless series

of photos that came out black

or out of focus and had to be

reshot at the last minute with

a Polaroid. One day, the metal

film canister got stuck and I

stabbed myself with a screw-

driver trying to get it open.

Bleeding into the chemicals,

I fled to the hospital for

bandaging and a tetanus shot.

The worst part was that when

I finally got the canister open,

the pictures were fine, but the

light was on, and I watched

as they faded away.

But I got better at it. I used to love going to the community center darkroom, developing piles of pictures while the rock music blared and nobody knew where I was except Louie, the parks and rec guy in charge. I also spent many happy hours in newspaper darkrooms ranging from clean and modern to overgrown closets where the walls were speckled brown with ancient chemicals and the air was so thick with fumes that I got dizzy and had to come out to breathe. I bought an enlarger and a full set of chemicals, trays, tongs and other tools to set up my own darkroom in kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms.

Over the years, I carried my trusty Minolta, the flash, and several heavy lenses to car wrecks, banquets, city council meetings, award ceremonies, jump rope-a-thons and school talent shows. I even took it all to Portugal. By then, I had purchased a second camera "body," so I could shoot slides with one camera and color prints with another. I spent over $100 developing 10 rolls of film.

I got good pictures, but times were changing. Our tour guide carried a much smaller camera, about the size of a business envelope, and got better pictures than I did. Everything on that camera was automatic. How could that be, I wondered?

Now automatic was all the buzz. For our anniversary in 1996, my husband bought me a Pentax camera, purse-sized and all automatic. Soon the old Minolta grew dusty in the cupboard. With my new camera, I no longer had to calculate exposures or worry if my vision was fuzzy. It set the exposure and focused the picture for me. The built-in flash took care of the lighting. Hold it up, click, done. I didn't even have to advance to the next picture. The film advanced on its own, and when the roll was done, it automatically rewound itself.

By now, I had the option of developing my own film, sending it to a professional processor or taking it to a one-hour photo shop where they'd run it through a machine and make my prints while I had lunch or bought groceries. It was getting difficult to find black and white film or slide film. Everyone was doing color, including the newspapers.

And then, seemingly overnight, the world went digital. Instead of film, images were recorded on computer chips. Darkrooms became obsolete. At the newspaper where I used to work, most of the photographers were laid off. Reporters were given digital cameras to illustrate their own stories.

I resisted. As a freelancer, I usually had time to send my film away for processing, and I could always have a CD-Rom made if I needed computerized images. I loved my Pentax, and I was used to film. Although I didn't need to calculate exposures anymore, I could analyze the lighting of any location and know what would make a good pictures. I did not want to learn a whole new way of shooting.

But like DVDs, CDs and cell phones, digital photography pushed into my life, whether I wanted it or not. At the top of Mary's Peak, at the High Desert Museum, at the Grand Canyon, seemingly everywhere we went, people thrust their tiny digital cameras into my hand and asked me to take their pictures. Uh, okay. I did my best to center them on the screen and pushed the shutter, hoping something good would come of it. I didn't even know I could check my work right away.

The last straw was an assignment for Northwest Senior News. I snapped a picture of a woman I had just interviewed and was startled when she jumped up to look at the back of my camera. "Where's the picture?" she asked.

"It isn't digital," I said.

"What? How will I know if it's okay?"

"We'll have to wait, but I'm sure it's fine."

"No, I don't like this."

Wow. That had never happened before. Previously, my pictures were like my words, mine to know until they were published. The subject never asked to pre-approve the photos. They knew it was impossible.

I used Christmas money to join the digital world. I bought everything, the camera, the memory card, the case, the battery charger. The clerk at Staples was delighted. I spent the rest of the day taking pictures and playing with them on the computer.

Now I only have to worry about running out of batteries. I still have my old Minolta in a huge bag full of lenses and filters, and my Pentax hangs off the bookshelf ready to go, but I suspect I won't be using them much anymore.

Will the pictures last, my husband asked. A worthy question. The photos in our wedding album are already fading and turning reddish. I am well aware that computers go out of date in a few years. Unless someone prints the pictures on photo paper and saves them in an air-conditioned archive, perhaps most of today's photos will disappear. Maybe one day, researchers will refer to this as the lost era, the digital age. Maybe not.

All I know is I have this tiny camera that can give me a picture right now and I can't wait to go out and take some more. Sitting here surrounded by computers, CD players, fancy phones and camera gear, I know everything hinges on electricity and AA batteries. I know that we are moving farther and farther from nature and from reality. I know that we have gone too far, but like everyone else, I can't resist.

Digital photography is like writing on a computer. Before, whatever we committed to paper or film was there forever. But on computer media, you can write or shoot anything without taking time to plan or compose because it can be deleted and done over and over. In a way, this is bad. We may save and send out down things that are not worthy. We may not take the time think things through, but at the same time, but it frees us to experiment without the worry of wasting paper, ink or film. In the old days, once a piece of film was exposed to light, it could never be used again. Now, there is no film. It's as if we're recording images in the air, to be preserved only if we want to. Otherwise, they float away and disappear.

It's an amazing change. No commitment, no waste. Or is there? Does each word and image get recorded somewhere, even if we delete it? And what if we are too hasty with the delete button or too slow to press "save?" It's gone, like a thought or a dream that we forget as soon the clock radio sends the morning news into our ears.

It's a whole new world.

About the time I was heading into newspaper work, I married a man who had a Minolta SRT 101, a sturdy Japanese single lens reflex camera that was the latest thing. I took three semesters of adult ed photography, learning how to set f-stops and apertures, develop film and print my pictures in the darkroom. That camera was heavy on its own, but when you attached the six-inch tall electronic flash and added a telephoto or zoom lens, you practically needed a sidecar to carry it. The only thing automatic on that camera was the light meter, which allowed you to look into the viewfinder and match a needle with a circle. Just to be sure, we were told to