Peace

 

The Russian Space Station Mir, circa 1992

It's strange to admit that life in the late 1980's and early 1990's was a bit like living in the Dark Ages, compared to now. In those days, we felt as if we had come a long way from the even darker times of the previous years. After many decades of the Cold War, the fall of the Russian Wall gave us the illusion of peace in the world. Instead of looking to the skies with fear inspired by movies like War Games (1983), we occasionally saw the serene light of Mir, passing silently through the stars. A gleam of hope, a heavenly reminder of "Peace" from the Russians.

But for all of the technologies that were spun off of the race to put communications satellites in orbit, send humans to the moon, and build space stations in low earth orbit, we were still not much ahead of our grandparents, when it came to everyday modern conveniences in those years.

Take photography, for instance. I was still using the same emulsion films my grandfather used, right up to the early 2000's. I wanted paper prints to put in a photo album, so I primarily shot with color-negative film like Kodak Gold 200, rather than the Ektachrome and Kodachrome slide (transparency) films my grandfather loved. When he and grandma came to visit, he and my dad would load up his slides into one of my dad's slide carousels and they'd set up the slide projector and large screen in the living room. My mom would make the popcorn, and we'd have ourselves a slideshow. A slideshow made the pictures larger than life and it was much more fun than looking at 3-1/2 by 5-inch prints. But it was also quite the production and it required a lot more effort and planning than spontaneously pulling a photo album off the bookshelf and passing it around.

My old-fashioned film SLR (single-lens reflex) camera had a light meter with both auto and manual exposure settings. I quickly learned that the auto setting couldn't be trusted, and I never used auto again after that. I set the f/stop and shutter speed manually prior to each exposure (but sometimes forgot), depending on the lighting conditions and the effects I wanted to achieve. I had to focus the lens manually (which I also sometimes forgot to do). I also had to advance the film manually with a winding lever after taking each exposure (the shutter was disabled after each use until the film was advanced, so I could never forget that step). The more expensive cameras had auto-focus and auto-film-advancement, but I couldn't justify spending the money on those features.

Other than the expense of buying film all the time (and paying for the processing and prints), one of the greatest problems with film was its analog nature. There was no in-camera preview of your pictures. The film inside the camera contained your results, and you couldn't see them until you got the film developed. Photography was sort of like living with Schrödinger's Cat: you wouldn't know if your pictures were good or bad until you took the film out and paid somebody to get a look at them. There were often no second chances for your shots, like at a family reunion, wedding, or a solar eclipse. You shot up your film and hoped for the best. Only hours, days, or weeks later, when you got your film developed, would you be able to see what you got. If your focus was poor, or there was motion blur, or if the lighting was tricky and you didn't get your shutter speed and f/stops correct, your shoot was a total bust and you couldn't go back and try again. The event was over, and all your subjects were gone away. Personal disappointment with your results was multiplied and compounded by the time and money you wasted and by the reminders that would eventually come from each and every person you promised to share your pictures with! Disappointment like that was a hobby killer. Cameras were sold, given or thrown away, or left in a closet rather than put to good use. And the people who thought they wanted to buy a camera and get into photography were forced to give up on their dream. It just wasn't worth the hassles and heartache.

The other aspect of film's analog nature was that the only facts or data that automatically stayed with your pictures through the years was the type of film you used (Kodak, Fuji, Konica, etc.) and the order in which you took them. The film processors would develop your negatives and cut them into segments of 4 frames (exposures) each before making prints from them. Film type and exposure numbers were pre-burned onto the edges of the negatives. The negative strips would be sent back to you so that you could order reprints of individual photos by sending the appropriate negative segment back to the processor and requesting reprints by exposure number (see the picture of a color negative at the bottom of this page). Everything else, though, like the camera model, shutter speed, the f/stop, the focal length of the lens, and possibly where you took the picture, was preserved only if you took the time and effort to write those things down in a photography notebook or journal. 

Taking notes was not something I liked to do in those years! Can you imagine? Every time you snapped a picture, you'd have to stop everything and write down the details of your exposure. It took a special person to have such diligence in their picture taking! And if you didn't write it down, you couldn't learn much from your shooting experience. Neither could anyone else learn from your shooting experience. What's worse, many years later, you'll have no idea where or when some of your favorite photos were taken. And you probably won't be able to recall the camera settings. In the very least, I could have spent some leisure time here or there going through my negatives and marking their envelopes with dates and general details of the pictures, while it was still reasonably fresh in my mind. Names of the people, places, and things in my photos. There was plenty of time to do something like that. Alas, I was never one to be that organized, unfortunately!  

The one good thing, perhaps, about the analog nature of film was its inherent privacy and security advantages. Only you had your negatives and journal information regarding your pictures. If you sent a print to someone and they marveled at your image quality (lighting, sharpness, smoothness, etc), they couldn't snoop into your EXIF data and say, "Oh, he used a 1/4000 shutter speed. No wonder there was no motion blur!" Or, "Oh, the film speed was ASA 3200 and the lens had an aperture setting of f/1.8. No wonder the picture was well-illuminated without using a flash, even though the room lighting was dim at the party." Photographers' techniques were kept secret. This gave job security to the family photographer by keeping the masses from getting into photography on their own by stealing his or her techniques. 

Compare that to today's smartphone cameras. The EXIF data is stored with the picture file, and it has all the details of the exposure, including the camera model and the GPS location. It even connects to Apple or Google maps and shows you the location and the direction you were facing when you took the picture! It's all there. You don't need to write anything down in a notebook. And if you choose to share the EXIF data, all your secret techniques are an open book, allowing others to learn from your techniques. Ironically, all of that wonderful EXIF data is useless now because nobody cares about it. Nobody needs to care about it or to learn from it. It's only the old guys like me who want to care about it, perhaps for no greater reason than force of habit.

I was pretty good about saving all my negatives (exposed film) through the years. But I did not organize them well. Except for a few months while I was learning photography on my own through trial and error, I did not keep any photography notebooks or journals. I have a couple of boxes with prints and negatives, but they're all rather jumbled up. Finding the negative of a specific print might require hours of searching through hundreds of envelopes! Once found, all those forgotten details come a-haunting! "Why, oh why didn't I write them down?"

I had that experience just the other day as I was digitally scanning some of my old negatives and I came across the picture above, of the Russian space station Mir. I still have some vague memories of taking that picture, and I think I remember where I was at the time when I took it. But I have no recollection of the date. Not even the exact year! A friend of mine back then, who happened to be one of the few people I knew who had his own computer and could find out exactly when and where to look for the Mir space station passing overhead, told me when it was going to happen. So I took my camera out on that night and drove to a dark site well away from the city's night-lighting glow and shot a picture or two. Since it's a photo of the Mir space station, I know that the photo had to have been taken some time between 1986 and 2001 (Mir, of course, no longer exists). And using some other memories of my whereabouts in those years, I believe I have correctly narrowed it down to sometime around the year 1992. Could be wrong. But that's the best I can guess!

Although the date and time is forever lost, the negative tells me I shot it with the very fast Konica 3200-speed film that I used for astrophotography in those years. I'm guessing I used a wide lens aperture, like f/2.8 to f/4.0, because I was shooting in the dark. The negative also tells me that the Mir shot was one of the final exposures on that roll of Konica 3200, which I usually bought in the 24-exposure variety. By the way, if you look closely at the negative in the picture at the bottom of this page, you'll see another problem we astrophotographers frequently ran up against: the dreaded negative cutting! In normal "people and pets" daylight shooting, the frames on the negatives were dense and easy to see. The negatives were normally cut without hurting any shot on the roll. But shooting the night sky was confusing for the film processors. They often assumed that exposures of the night sky were mistakes and they sometimes cut the negatives in the middle of a frame. When sending our prints in for processing, we astrophotographers had to remember to tell them, "Do not cut the negatives!" Our negatives would then be returned to us in complete rolls, allowing us to cut them where we pleased.  

As I looked at this picture of Mir, I can tell by the number of stars recorded that it was a fairly deep exposure. Not your typical snapshot of less than a second. More like 10 or 15 seconds. Enough to cause the stars to trail slightly (due to the earth's rotation), since I used a fixed (non-tracking) tripod for the shot. But given the lack of information as to the f/stop, how long did I need to expose that negative, in order to pick up the background stars so well? 

One of the cool aspects of shooting a spacecraft against a starry background is that I can use the stars to calculate the shutter speed by measuring the length of spacecraft's streak on the image. Mir's orbital speed (17,200 mph) and altitude (average of about 225 miles) are given on its Wikipedia page. With those two bits of information, I can calculate how many miles are represented by the streak, which is approximated with the small-angle formula by knowing the angular degrees covered by the streak. 

Using a star chart as a reference, the streak is seen to be roughly 25 degrees in length. The small-angle formula needs the length of the streak in arcseconds (90,000), multiplied by the height of the spacecraft in miles (225), and divided by the constant 206265, gives the distance traveled as 98 miles. Then using the distance formula to figure out how many seconds it would take Mir to travel 98 miles at a speed of 17,200 mph, tells me that my exposure was about 20 seconds long.

Of course, nowadays, if you wanted to take a 20-second exposure with your DSLR, you'd just set the shutter speed for 20 seconds. But that's not how we did it with the old-fashioned SLRs from the film days! My SLR camera maximum preset exposure time couldn't be set for an exposure time of 20 seconds. Instead, it had a BULB setting (also included in today's DSLRs), for use with a gadget called a "cable release." Early versions of cable releases used air pressure to hold the shutter open by squeezing an air bulb at the end of the tube that connected to camera's shutter button. At the shutter-button end of the tube, there was a pin that would be forced downward to trip the shutter when the air bulb was squeezed. To lock the shutter open indefinitely, a screw at the bulb end prevented the air from returning from the tube and re-inflating the bulb. When you wanted to end the exposure, you would loosen the screw to allow air to return and remove the air pressure on the shutter-button pin. I used a newer-design cable that was self-locking (self-gripping) without a bulb. It was essentially a cable within a cable with spring tension. You pushed the cable button and it locked itself down, forcing the inner cable to extend through the opening at the camera end and press down the shutter button. A ring around the cable button could then be pushed to release the grip on the inner cable, which, in turn, released the shutter button. These cable releases are still sold, but today's digital photographers are more likely to use wireless remote shutter releases. And today's DSLRs typically don't have the threaded hole in the shutter button to accommodate an old-fashioned cable release. 

So my 1990's "high tech" method to shoot a 20-second exposure with my SLR film camera was to set the exposure to BULB, then I'd press the cable release button and count out loud to myself, "Thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three...." When I reached "thousand-twenty" I released the shutter button.

Setting up a satellite shot using a camera lens and fixed tripod is fairly easy if you know in advance some nice constellations it will be passing through. You can aim the camera at the constellation and get the lens properly framed and focused using some of the medium-bright stars. Then you just wait until the satellite gets inside the boundaries of the constellation and start exposing. For my shot of Mir, I knew it would be passing through the Square of Pegasus, so I used its bright stars to frame the shot and focus the camera.

After releasing the shutter, I had to wait quite a while to see my picture. Could have been several days or weeks until I had a chance to drive to a One-Hour Photo store across town and get my film developed.

And even though I dutifully placed my negative in a box for some future purpose, I never imagined that one day, I'd have a personal computer and scan the negative to produce a digital image!

The negative I scanned to make the top picture.