Flashback to the days of taking photographs on rolls of film

Once upon a time, many years ago, I became interested in photography; not just taking the pictures you understand, but processing them as well and finally creating my own prints. It was great fun, but quite hard work.

In those days photos were taken on film, either black and white — or colour and that could be quite a chore. Black and white film came a in a great range of sizes and grains, 35 millimetre (the width of the negative film), 120, 620, quarter plate, half-plate and even whole plate, but both the film and the cameras were rather expensive, especially when you got up to that size. In the earlier days of my hobby the grain of the film was rather course and so it was better to use a larger camera for serious work — 35mm film came in a little later, after the scientists at places like Kodak learned how to make the grain much finer. The grain of the film was simply the size of the minute pieces of sensitised silver with which the sheet of acetate was coated; it was by exposing the silver to light that the image was formed, after treating with several chemicals. The fine grain and 35mm film meant that cameras could also be made much smaller, without any loss of quality.

Once photographs had been taken it was time to process it and so make the image visible. This was a fairly hefty and time consuming occupation, and it all had to be done in a darkroom, under a very low red, or sometimes green light, colours that film wasn’t sensitive to. Once in the darkroom, and before the lights were lowered, it was necessary to mix the developer and fixer to treat the film. The developer changed the chemical structure of the silver crystals and then the fixer, as the name implies, stopped the process and made it permanent. The actual processing could be done in one of two methods, either in open dishes, or, more conveniently in a light-proof developing tank, where the unprocessed film was loaded and the various chemicals poured in as and when needed for the process. The film had to be gently jostled continuously for about 10 minutes and when the last chemical — the fixer — was poured out, several refills of water had to be introduced, to wash away any remnants of the chemistry, then the film could be hung up to dry.

The resulting exposed film was now called the negative because the image wasn’t usable as it came from the camera. Light at the time the picture was taken meant more effect on the silver, so it went blacker. Therefore a girls white dress, in sunlight, appeared as black on the negative, while her black hair would be clear film.

Then, basically, the whole process had to be gone through again, only this time a piece of light sensitive paper would be placed on a board, again in a red light environment, the negative laid on top and a white light shone briefly through it to create another negative image on the sensitised paper, which of course meant the image was transposed back to positive. Then the same process of development took place, to show and then fix the image. I’ve streamlined this description very much for simplicity.

I’ve written all this as a reminder of how complicated and time consuming photography was, before the age of the digital camera. I haven’t even mentioned colour photography and retouching either.

Nowadays a high definition camera need be no larger than a postage stamp, virtually anything electronic, like a mobile phone or a wristwatch incorporates a camera as well as its prime function. There are no darkroom or chemicals required and you can see as soon as you photograph something has turned out the way you envisioned it, and if not, we just delete it and try again! Just think of the number of photographers of 50 years or so ago, coming home with an irreplaceable roll of film, only to find, on processing it, that the exposure was set wrongly or something, it must have been heartbreaking! Yet now we’re all expert photographers and we never bring home any unusable pictures — do we?

Do you remember having to take photographs on film? What did you do with all the photos you took?

Do you have a story to share with Starts at 60? We want to publish it. Sign up as a contributor and submit your stories to here. Stories written by over-60s go into the draw for some great weekly prizes. You can also join the Starts at 60 Bloggers Club on Facebook to talk to other writers in the Starts at 60 community and learn more about how to write for Starts at 60.