Sunrises from darkness

Last week two sundogs tore into the sky, sandwiching a glorious sunrise. It was sight to behold.

Enough so that we had our passenger, young Nicholas, pull out his phone to take a picture. Apart from a little reluctance, like most teenagers show when a parent suggests something remotely abnormal, he got ready for the shot.

Window down, truck stopped on the laneway, what followed sounded more like the red-carpet during fashion week in Milan, or the paparazzi in England chasing a disgraced royal. In seconds he had a dozen photos of that magnificent landscape, each marked with a distinctive click.

As quickly as his mini protest subsided, the window was up, sheltering us from the dreadful cold that gripped the countryside days ago. The phone, still out of its holster (in his case a pocket), provided a distraction on the way to school. A game, video clip or recent hockey stats are often a source of reprieve from chatting with dad. No harm, no foul; it gave us time to think too.

That particular morning thoughts went back 40 years to a lady by the name of Jean Dobben. She was a correspondent from our Drayton office for years. Along with horticulture and countless other volunteer hours spent around Drayton, Peel and Maryborough, she would take photos for the local newspaper.

Most of our old photos were with 35mm cameras. One roll of film may have had a dozen or two opportunities to get a good photo. Each click required a manual advancement to the next photo. When complete, the spool would need to be re-wound and kept safe from sunlight or else exposures would be rendered useless. It was arduous compared to today’s digital options.

If the taking of photos wasn’t difficult enough, the next step was far worse. Developing the film happened in complete darkness, hence the phrase dark room. Some such rooms were more elaborate than others and indeed, some newspaper operations were far more skilled in the nuances of photography. It was a skill never thoroughly mastered with our organization and stands as a regret of the pre-digital age.

Back to Jean. Along with pages of handwritten notes that needed to be typed, she often had a spool or two of film that needed developed. Having taken part in the photography club at high school (a tiny office space adjacent to the school rifle range in the basement), learning how to develop negatives and process prints, we entered the dark room with a measure of confidence. At the ripe age of 16, how hard could this be? In a word, it was disastrous. 

Due to a misstep along the way, whether a poor batch of chemicals or timing, there wasn’t a single photo developed from her submissions. For that outcome we got a memo from a staff person at the Drayton office that Jean had left, “never to return again.” All that effort to take the photos was down the drain and, more importantly, she would have faced some ribbing in the community for not getting it in the paper that week. Luckily, Jean did come back, but that slip-up in the dark room finally forced the move to D&I Photo, who processed hundreds of photos for us until digital technology took over.

The point remains, however, that technology is an amazing thing to have watched from the dark room to today’s fancy gadgets that fit in the palm of a hand. It’s phenomenal.

And to think, at least a generation of photographers and possibly two, have no clue what preceded this modern wonder and everyday convenience.