The good old days.
Sigh, roll your eyes or even those easier-to-roll substitute ones kindly provided for you by the management, but you are confusing many things: oranges and apples but backwards, as it were.
There most certainly were hellish old days, but what have they to do with the good ones?
Equipment was sooo expensive only the rich could start up in photography? Bullshit! I started up on next to friggin’ zero, with a second-hand Rollei T (the cheapest model you could get) and an Exakta I bought new as an apprentice engineer! I have often worked out that I could never have afforded to start up today. It isn’t even as simple a matter as buying cameras – how expensive has space become? During the last twenty years, even many of the leading London stars gave up (hardly willingly) their studios and had to hire as required!
Yes, making colour prints wasn’t easy and as with Fred and his flying, I too know of what I speak: I was the bleedin’ colour department in the in-house photo unit where I worked for a while, until I left. And no, it wasn’t cheap out in the commercial world either. But businesses could certainly afford colour prints, though most advertising wanted transparencies.
I remember that I was perfectly free to roam our local park with a simple Voiglander Vito B in hand, then the later ‘blads, and never even thought I’d be rolled. Today, I wouldn’t dream of it. Look at stamper’s moment on that Glasgow bridge: and he was lucky, it didn’t turn into anything. But the worry/fear that it easily can now lives with us all. Was a time you could pat an unknown but attractive kid on the head, or just smile at him; my wife could coo her heart out at some baby doll lying in a pram on the pavement whilst it’s mother was in the shop buying something. Today, any of those three, innocent, actions could get you arrested for assault, sex crimes or neglect!
Heysoos, it’s become better?
Think, for pity’s sake.
Rob C