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Bart Crattie and Beth Osborne were married June 25. It was a beautiful ceremony in a fantasy setting. The little Rock Church in Mentone is something out of a Walt Disney movie. And the pastor could well be Edmund Gwen as Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street”—except for the beard. Born in 1921, he seems as if he could recite passages from the Bible as if telling a story to eager children. One end of the small, one-room church is
literally a rock, a boulder standing a story and a half high to loom
over the pitched roof of the building lined with windows. The sanitary facilities are two outdoor johnnies
built back to back. Someone
said a snake had been found in the Ladies side and the bride used the
Men’s rest room to dress while her attendants held a large mirror.
And I’ve never seen a happier bride as her eyes sparkled with
the moisture of dreams and happiness. My gift was wedding pictures. Beth stuck me with a pin when she put a flower on me, saying
her “official wedding photographer” had to have a corsage.
My digital stayed in my pocket and I used my 35-mm Minolta to
shoot two rolls of film, 48-pictures.
There were plenty of cameras there.
If the blast of electronics flashes going off could have been
transferred to $10 bills, the couple could have taken a cruised around
the world. Time was when it was something special to be a
photographer. You had to
use your eyes to estimate the distance to a subject, rather than trust
the faulty range finders which lined up two mirrors on the side of the
better cameras. If you were
using a sports view, a pop up wire square for framing the shot, you
relied on your sense of distance. At
one time I felt I could call with a foot a subject 30 feet away.
You also had to be able to judge the amount of light available
with or with a flashgun. The
speed of the shutter and opening of the aperture had to be balanced to
give the film the right amount of light. My love affair with photography began when my
father brought home some powder packages from the Eastman Chemical
Company, later changing its name to Kodak.
There were packages for developing film and paper, an acid fixing
package and a bottle of something called ascetic acid.
I uncorked it and took a whiff.
Seemed as if someone hit me in the back of the head with a sledge
hammer. I never did that
again. Those were the days
when not everyone was a photographer or developed their own pictures.
I earned my first money as a commercial photographer taking
graduation pictures of the seniors in my class, a dollar for an eight by
ten. My introduction to the Speed Graphic came when I
was a copy boy for the Norfolk Virginian Pilot in 1950. My friend and classmate, Neal Clark, Jr., was four years
older than I. He was on the
photography staff of the pilot and explained the functions of the camera
that was the workhorse of newspapers.
With the front shutter, a series of metal leaves opening and
closing, limited to a speed of 500th of a second, the focal plane on the
back of the camera was used for higher speeds.
Like a window shade with a slit in it, the focal plane was rolled
up and released by a trigger for speeds up to 1,000 of a second.
It used a four-inch by five-inch sheet of film.
It wide angle allowed large areas to be covered by a single shot. When you walked into a group with that big black
camera and the boxlike camera bag for film and bulbs, everyone knew who
you were. Here comes the
photographer, people would exclaim.
Just pointing that poignant tool in a general direction drew
poses and smiles. For a night parade, Neal had me on the opposite side of the
street with a slave unit. That’s
a flash gun with an electronic cell that fires the bulb in response to
the main flash. Young girls
in the parade strutted in front of me, thinking I was taking their
picture when the flash went off. In the days before the electronic flashes, there
were two sizes of flash bulbs: the peanut bulb which popped into the
flashgun and the 25-watt bulb which you had to screw in.
Nothing is more painful than the peanut bulb going off when it
short circuited, nothing except the 25-watt bulb burning its thin shell
into your fingers. In my first weekly newspaper job as
reporter-photographer, I made more money doing commercial photography on
the side than as a reporter. For
a wedding, I shot ten pictures for $3 a picture.
Film and paper were expensive—ten cents for the film and a
penny for the paper. Each
shot had to count. I carried that heavy Speed Graphic so long I
felt as if my left arm was longer than my right.
The film was either in a pack or a holder which held two sheets
back to back. The dark
slide had a silver side and a black side to indicate if the film were
exposed or not. I confess I
became a show off, popping the peanut bulb into the air, catching it and
inserting a new one. Through
practice, I could extract the film holder from the back of the camera,
flip it with a twist of fingers and reinsert it for the unexposed side.
I felt like a Japanese cook flipping his knives while cooking a
steak. This worked fine,
except once when I hurriedly pulled out the holder to do my flip at a
basketball game. The holder
went sliding across the floor in the midst action which had to be
stopped. I sheepishly tip
toed onto the floor to retrieve it. Anyone who ever used that camera came to love
it. Then, Life and Time
magazines changed the profession with the use of 35-mm photography.
A roll of 24 shots could be used inexpensively and with greater
latitude of light availability. Logic
also was you shoot enough pictures some will be good.
The Speed Graphic was retired.
No longer was the photographer recognized by the impressive black
instrument of art he carried. The
photographer could be that young man or woman with an unobtrusive camera
standing in the corner. Now there are digital cameras. You don’t have to know anything about range, light meters
or shutter speed. Technology
does everything for you. A
first time camera user may take a picture as impressive as someone with
a lifetime’s experience. One thing for sure, Bart and Beth will have
plenty of pictures for their wedding.
But if anyone had said, here comes the photographer, someone
could have asked: which one. |
