The Club Chairman’s evening was a great reminder not to ignore your pre-digital photography. It was a great show based on old scanned negatives from his trip through South America, the Galapagos and Easter Island — A sort of “in the footsteps of Heyerdahl” section of his round the world trip. I though that some of his photographs from Easter Island were much better than those of the same subjects on show at the Kon Tiki museum in Oslo.
It was also a great reminder of how in many ways it is much easier it is now to capture an image. Being able to swing the sensor’s ISO between extremes makes photography much easier, but the older technology did not have us keeping careful track of white-balance to the same extent.
It’s also interesting as one works through the family photographic archive scanning old slides, and later negatives with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 to see how photographic habits have changed. One’s parents/grandparents were content with 6 exposures as guests at wedding — how many did you take last time you went to one? Or perhaps consider a whole holiday on 2 rolls of film. It brings into focus the reasoning behind Adobe’s early decision to leave light box functionality out of LightRoom.