The Story of Photography

This fellow’s post is actually about faux finishes, but his description at the end of the way things used to be made me laugh:

“I have almost no pictures of my work from back then. I tell my children that you used to have to buy a reel of plastic film covered with metallic goo and keep it hermetically sealed in an expensive camera, and when you were done with 24 pictures or so, you’d take them out and drive to a store and leave them with a clerk and then go back a week later after they were done drizzling them with strange chemicals and printing them on shiny pieces of paper. They were all completely white or completely black, generally, when you finally got a look at them.

I tell them, but they figure I’m pulling their leg.”

1 comment

  1. To quote (from memory) Arthur C Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology will resemble magic." Today's commonplaces would have looked like magic to me as a young adult in the late 60's!

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