Pre-digital Technology

Photojournalism has come a long way because of the advancements in technology. What rocketed a photograph’s ability to be spread and produced to the masses is the innovation of digital techniques. In the beginning, the process to develop photographs caused a great hindrance to the productivity of photojournalists. Originally the process was called the wet plate collodion process. Wet plates prevented photojournalists from accomplishing what they can today. Mainly because one could not take a picture quickly. As Professor Nordell pointed out, if there was not enough exposure, a subject would have to stay very still for minutes for enough light to show up and for it not to be blurry. Photojournalists do not want subjects to pose or be staged, they want to capture things immediately.

Portable Dark room

Photo By: William Micklethwaite

Image Source:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Micklethwaite_Portable_studio.jpg

As described in the video by Quinn Jacobson, the wet plate process had about 6 steps but each was important and critical for the quality of the final product. First, you have to cut the glass to the right size. Clear glass is used for negatives and black glass is used for positives. Then, the glass need to be deburred, or basically roughed up on the edges so that fingers do not get cut as well as, to create a ridge to hold the film. Then, the glass needs to be cleaned well or later, the emulsion will peel. Next, the chemical solution, collodion, needs to be poured on the plate evenly. This will affect how many defections will appear in the photo. When the collodion has set, it is sensitized by being dropped into liquid silver nitrate for a few minutes.

After the plate is prepared, it is ready to be exposed to take the picture. How long depends on how much light there is, and this is something that a photographer really needs to have experience in to have it come out the way they intend. After exposure, the plate needs to be develop, which once again, takes experience because it could be under or over developed and after all that time and work, a picture can be ruined. Even after that, the plate needs to be fixed with potassium cyanide to turn it from a bluish negative to an amber positive.

This complicated process prevented photojournalists from really having the freedom and ease to concentrate solely on the message of their photos because they had to worry about the techniques. Not only did the steps have to be performed correctly, but in a time limit. The wet plate could not dry or else the picture would not turn out. This gave the photographer about ten minutes and was also limiting because they could not necessarily always travel with a portable dark room for which the process required.

One famous example of the difficulty of wet plates was Robert Capa’s pictures during the D-Day invasion. A darkroom technician dried the film too quickly and most of them were ruined, leaving less than a dozen out of 106 to document that legendary day, despite the danger Capa put himself in to take many good pictures.

The other day, I took a picture just because it came to mind.

 My sister was acting as younger sisters do, being weird outside my door. I thought it was funny because she looked so creepy to me, and I quickly took a picture. I didn’t have to think about how the technology worked, or make any other effort than deciding to take a picture, pulling up an app on my smartphone, and pressing a button. We take for granted how much we have been able to learn from the world because photojournalists can quickly capture images that are important for us to know about, many being in the heat of the moment.