The Analog Line - Part Three - Whyness

Why is always a good word - particularly if you are a four-year-old and want to torment your parents. You have to judge the number of times you can get away with it before you're sent to your room or smacked. When you are older you have to be even more careful because there may be a set of encyclopaedias in the house and you'll be sent there. If you are very unlucky you'll learn things. But " why? " is a good question for the prospective analog photographer to ask themselves - a clear answer will make the rest of the process so much easier. For instance: a. Why do analog photography? After all we've had 20+ years of increasingly wonderful digital imaging that seems to be able to cover any need or want. Why ditch this and go back in to a dead technology? Well, your answers can be many fold. You may want to use old equipment because it feels right. You may want to get the 'look' of older processes by actually using those old processes. You may want to feel yourself part of a great tradition. You may want to pose dramatically for the admiration of yourself and others. All valid reasons for doing something - and you'll discover when the processes get more complex that you'll need a valid reason for diving deeper into the technology. It will not get easier as time goes by - the door of support and success is closing a little more each year. But it is still open. If you are of a scientific bent, or a curious nature, you'll have the best 'why' of all. It is not quite the same as exploring a whole new world of technology - that world has existed for a long time - but you'll still find out things that the internet and the instruction book for your digital camera will never tell you. If you are a born historian, analog photography is meat, drink, sleep and play to you. It contains much of the history of the last century and half and presents it in ways that you can grasp instantly. If you take it up, you may be adding to the long roll of visual record, and if the internet goes bung you may have better records than anyone. b. Why do it now? Because you will not do it in 5 years time with any of the facility that you can at present. You cannot do it now with the ease that you could have 5 years ago. Get in while the getting is good. c. Why present it to other people as analog work? Because analog images can look subtly different from digital ones and someone may want just that difference. Because analog may stir their aquisitve nature. Because they may be pure and unsullied and regard a print that is sabotaged with unwashed fixer as being somehow better than an electronic image on a screen. Don't laugh - art has been sold on stranger ideas. When you start to do the deed with the older cameras, films, and processes, you'll be asking why all the time. Why does the film have lightning bolts across it - because you rewound it at a blistering pace in a static-charged atmosphere. Why are their red and orange patches seeping in from the edges - because the 1960's camera you got at the Cashies has had the foam seals around the film compartment perish, and light is getting in. See the Camera Electronic repair department to have those seals renewed. Why are all the negatives dark - because stop bath is not fixer - you missed a step. Why are all the slides dark - because the light meter on the 50's camera you dug out of Grannie's cupboard has a selenium meter that has long since ceased to work. See the Camera Electronic sales department for a new Sekonic light meter. And on, and on. You'll be aided in your quest for knowledge by the books and magazines that were produced in the golden years of photography - try getting Kodak publications of the 50's and 60's - and the British Amateur photographer magazine was always a wealth of information. They did regular lens tests using a ship moored in the Thames - HMS WELLINGTON - and it let you compare one optic with another by actual images. Looking back into technology starts to be a nostalgia trap for some, and too far back gets you into territory that is downright bizarre. But even if you avoid the descriptions and prescriptions for wet-plate cameras and printing out paper and stick to more modern literature, you can still benefit enormously from picture books of any era. There is as much to learn from Fox-Talbot as there is from YouTube, and with " The Pencil Of Nature " there is no annoying sound track. Look to your heart's content, and keep on looking. Collect the biographies of famous photographers. Go to exhibitions of their works whenever you can - you'll be amazed at how good their good stuff was and how rotten their other imaging was.