the stampede of technological progress, part 5
After my days at Palmer’s Camera in Berkeley, I moved to Mendocino and [tried to] make a living as a photographer/custom photo printer. This was in ye olde days of the mid 1990s, and photo printing still involved a wet darkroom. I had pretty much the only custom color darkroom in the area, so I had a viable, if weird, little market niche. Doing my own printing was also an advantage when it came to selling my nature photography.
I enrolled in a desktop publishing class at my friendly neighborhood community college (CRMC, College of the Redwoods, Mendocino Coast). My immediate goal was to learn how to make brochures to promote my little business. Pagemaker led inevitably to PhotoShop, and PhotoShop led in several directions at once, changing my business and my entire life.
Compared to the abomination I’d used at Palmer’s, the Windows 95 machines at CRMC seemed positively sci-fi in their sophistication, at least they did when we were just running Pagemaker. During my second semester at CRMC, we tackled PhotoShop, and the consumer-grade Windows machines proved laughably inadequate. This was version 3 of PhotoShop, without RAM-snarfing features like layers.
After a few weeks of banging our heads into the wall trying to use PhotoShop on machines that crashed every few minutes, our class moved to the graphics lab, where we had more sophisticated computers with a then-whopping 128MB of RAM. The graphics lab also offered another improvement: it had Macs in addition to Stupid Windows Machines.
It didn’t take me long to switch to the Macs. Not only did they out perform the SWMs, but they were less in demand. Most of the other students had SWMs at home, so they didn’t want to clutter up their brains by learning a different operating system. So I could always get a Mac while others were duking it out over the SWMs.
Digital photo technology was in a weird state at that point in space and time. I didn’t even want a digital camera then. The ones I had used took pictures that were unsharp and toooo contrasty. Furthermore, they had very bad layout of the controls. The shooter had to navigate through dozens of bells and whistles to get to the useful features. Even if I did want one, they were frightfully expensive, and I was financially challenged.
Scanning film images was another option, but film scanners were exotic, expensive, cantankerous contraptions back then. Print scanners were good, but you needed a good print to scan. Since I had my own darkroom, that wasn’t a problem for me. For several years, my photo workflow involved making a 7×10ish print in the darkroom and scanning it.
Once you had a digital image file to work with, adjusting or manipulating it in PhotoShop was easy and fun. While PS has continued to improve since then, it was already fabulous. Its abilities to adjust brightness, contrast, and color locally or throughout an image were already far beyond anything I could have fantasized about in the wet darkroom.
But, once the image files were adjusted/manipulated, I still had to print them. CRMC had pretty typical inkjet printers for the time. They produced prints which were vibrant, saturated, surreal, and ephemeral. Their hyper-saturation was OK for some graphic design projects, where vibrancy was more important than accuracy, but for landscapes the hyper-fluorescent saturation was unacceptable. But then, the prints only lasted a few months before the colors turned to goo, so they were useless for fine art photography anyway.
Tags: stampede