Aren't we glad those days are long gone?
Glad they are gone because they would make amateur photography too expensive for the return on effort expended.
Were somebody else paying, and the stuff available, I'd be perfectly happy working through the good light with Kodachrome. It was kinda nice having that collection of film in the cool bag, ready to drop off at Kodak for their pro 24hr service at a small, additional charge. Gave my wife and myself another night in the Post House at Hemel Hempstead after a trip somewhere. It was the slow coming down from a very high high during the shoot. Life was something being lived at speed, at the top of its possibilities (mine) and worth every wrinkle I own on my face today.
But, situations always change, and digital means a quick happy snap with no real meaning to anything other than my own attempt to fill a void.
Do I
like digital? I don't really know, but it is the only route to making a picture today, as I indicated when I came in. Darkroom skills have gone, along with the challenge of their human dexterity limitations, and been substituted by a situation where art and skill have vanished, to be replaced by the boring reality that if you sit there long enough, you can create anything you damn well want to create. The problem, then, of the very wealthy man with nothing beyond his reach, who just keeps his hands in his pockets instead.
Equipment? That's a poor joke. Nothing has replaced the ease and "oneness" of, and just downright rightness of either the F or the F2, the slr equivalents of what the Leica M cameras were to others. On a tripod, Hassy 500 was and remains my undisputed favourite mistress. Digital bells and whistles have induced in me a dependency on automation that is terribly similar to the keyboard one, which has rendered my handwriting unintelligible even to myself ten minutes after I scribble a note about something. I have scraps of paper lying in the office, loaded with great ideas and bits of information lost forever because they have become nothing more than unreadable files.
Worse, though I find an excuse for myself in the dinosaur, there is none for today's youth that often appears as useless as time makes most of us much later on in the plan. You can't grow your mind when you desert human memory for a disk. Just because one can Google the answer to something in seconds doesn't imply that one actually learned anything.
Win something, probably always lose a lot more.
:-)