EARLY CHARLESTON NEWSPAPER PRINTING

PART 3  - PHOTOGRAPHY

In the mid 70s, I worked for the Daily Mail as a "Stringer".  This means that I filled-in for other photographers when they were on vacation or any time they needed me.  I also shot many news photos on my own that the newspaper printed, both the Daily Mail and Gazette.  When the first 4 channel crystal police scanners  hit the scene, I was the first photographer to own one.  I was really scooping the other photographers then, because they either had to wait for a phone call about a news story or listen to their police radio that was the size of a desktop computer that sat in the photo lab.  Meanwhile, with my portable hand held scanner, I might be just blocks away from breaking news when it happened.  The Editor figured out that I was scooping his guys, and asked me about my scanner.   He asked me to buy 3 or 4  so  they too could do what I did. At that time, we all used Nikon film cameras.  Normally shooting black & white for news because it was so much easier to process.  I had my own darkroom at the paper and also at home.  Our cameras were manual.  This means we had to set focus, speed, aperture, everything by hand, and in the case of a hot news story, had to do it QUICK.  We all carried light meters, because most cameras didn't have them or you couldn't trust them at the time.  The film we used was always 400.  That way we could shoot in darker situations or catch fast action.  Yes, the pictures were a bit grainy, but for news print, it didn't matter in the least.  When modern digital cameras came along, our whole world changed......

The following article first appeared in the Charleston Daily Mail in 2014.
It's the best account of local newspaper photography history that you will find anywhere.

As mentioned in the article, the first Nikon digital cameras were about $5000 just for the body.  Add another $5000 for the lenses you needed. That's about $18,000 in today's money, a price few but the newspaper and the rich could afford.  But Sony came out with a somewhat affordable camera line, of which I bought each as they came out.  Think about this: The first Sony digital consumer camera used a FLOPPY DISK, that was only 1.44 MB and held 8 photos.  You might print a decent 5x7 photograph, but needless to say, even though it looked pretty good for its time, the images were very poor by todays standards.   After I bought the Sony 707 which was 5 mega pixels, the Nikon's started coming down in price, although still expensive. Since I had my Nikon lens's from my film days,  I could now shoot digital and get really good photos.  Of course, I had to still use manual mode because my old lens's were strictly manual.  It would be a couple of years before I could afford the new digital lens's that made the entire process "point & shoot".  To this day, I shoot an average of  10 or more photos a day, and within minutes I have what might take an hour back then.  Even cell phone cameras can match anything that a good digital camera can, with a couple of exceptions:  I can slap a 600mm lens on my Nikon and get shots that no cell phone can, at this writing at least.  And if I want to get super fancy, I have many options on my camera that no cell phone can match, but once again, at the time of this writing.  But as cell phone cameras get more and more advanced, I wouldn't be surprised that a simple cell phone will one day be right up there with the best digital camera.

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