The Mindful Hiker: Photos on the trail
These photographs were taken at Point Reyes National Seashore, and other natural places in Northern California, by Stephen Altschuler, and processed digitally by Ruth Toledo Altschuler.
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Grieving the End of Film
Going through our old photography bags to make way for our new digital equipment, my wife and I paused, reminiscing about photo shoots with the old film cameras and manual focus lenses. We held each piece, turning it like you would a crystal, admiring the sleek black bodies and still clear white markings. “You know,” I said, “it’s a real loss, putting away this equipment. I took some great pictures with this FE2. Went to some great places. It never let me down.”
“Yeah, for me too,” Ruth agreed. “Each piece is a reminder of a story, an adventure.” We found some boxes of film, and we looked at one another, realizing we would never use film again. We were brought up with film. We held it. We processed it. We respected it. We threaded it through spools and poured chemicals on it. We hung it to dry. We inspected it as we put it into enlargers and blasted dust from it and light through it to produce black and white prints, which we marveled at when they began to appear in the developing tray. We had both spent hours, in our younger days, in the darkroom, preening and tweaking those prints for possible display or submitting to print media or to give to friends as gifts. Back in the day, I even set up a darkroom in a bathroom, with a three quarter inch plywood sheet cut to fit over the tub to hold the processing trays, a blackout shade on the window, toilet seat support for the enlarger, safe light replacement for the single bulb on the ceiling, and sink for the final step of washing the fixer off the print.
We set out all the now mothballed equipment on the kitchen table, flooded by the light of day once again, featured as they once were in our daily lives in a place of importance, resurrected from the tomb of the unknown cameras—those dark places in closets and drawers and, in our case, a big chest from Ikea, places with things atop and around them, making entry difficult, making memory of them fade into some manually operated past.
The equipment now sat exposed on the table like museum pieces in front of a ogling public 200 years from now, scratching their collective heads wondering what the hell film was anyway, and of the archaic procedure of threading that film from one spool to another inside the back of a camera. Imagine, they might say, opening the back of a camera to expose its innards, including, even, the back of the lens and the latent workings of its diaphragm.
But we were not scratching our heads. We were grieving for the loss of these faithful film companions that had brought us both pleasure and challenge and, yes, frustration. It was time to let go of the FE2 and the FG and the N90 and the old 80-200 f4 manual focus Nikon workhorse and the cable release and the extension tubes and extenders and the black and white filters and interchangeable viewfinders and, yes, the unused Fujichrome and Ektachrome and Kodacolor and Fujicolor. We could not throw out this film. We would store it away, along with the equipment, and one day bring it to the light of day again—not to use it—no, that was over—but to honor the service it rendered and the things it taught us—about light and exposure and composition and saturation and shadows and sharpness and color rendition, about the time of day and the moisture in the air and the temperature and the wind and the way flowers and people and animals and oceans and vineyards and trees and traffic and trolleys responded to all its nuances.
After we put this equipment back into storage, we put the new digital gear into its now honored place in our photo bags, which we kept at the ready. Ruth went over to the Mac and booted up a new program called Aperture where all our digital images were stored and organized, and started performing wondrous tasks she could never do in the darkroom of the past. Sharpening, saturating, brightening, even inspecting the focus with a built-in loupe. Then she dragged and dropped the image into Photoshop for some additional dodging and burning and cloning and adjusting the image size for the final print. It was all there in our high tech digital darkroom to improve upon the original, without toxic chemicals, without clumsy enlarging equipment, without an aching back and shriveled skin on our hands, leaning over developing and fixing trays, fussing with prints that often should have been thrown away immediately but had too much time invested in them to let them go so quickly. We had entered into a not-as-brave new world of photography, with new tools and operating manuals and “how many pixels do you have?” and possibilities that may even have drawn Ansel Adams’ interest.
Ruth and I looked at each other and had a good belly laugh, finally, over our grieving process and the makeshift kitchen table altar. We both knew that what we were leaving behind would always be in our hearts, helping us remember the seeds and roots that led to this fertile digital revolution. We bowed to the Ikea chest, let go of at least some of our grief, and gave thanks for the changes.
copyright Stephen Altschuler 2006
