Photography and the digital revolution

Paul Bobkowski is considered among the finest wedding photographers in the city. So why is he chopping down trees for a living? “It’s decent wages,” says Bobkowski, who has been shooting photos for about 20 years. He says he still tries to shoot some weddings on the weekend, but having to work a fulltime job makes that difficult. “What would I ideally want to be doing? I’d be a photographer with a fulltime studio.”
Bobkowski is one of many longtime, traditional film photographers whose careers have either been sidelined permanently or significantly diminished as digital photography and ever-advancing technology create a whole new generation of shutterbugs.
“Everybody with a nice camera thinks they’re a photographer and people will think they’re a professional,” says Bobkowski, who points to the economic downturn post-9/11 as the start of a decline in traditional photography. “A lot of people weren’t spending a lot on photos and everybody who had a camera thought they were a photographer.”
With the emergence of cell phones and more advanced cameras and computer software, there has been less demand for professional photographers and even less need for processing labs. While a trip to the neighborhood lab or studio once was a must, now even the most inexperienced enthusiast can produce decent-quality photographs. Throw in digital apps and social media tools like Facebook, through which you can “share” your favorite shots, and what you have is a completely new age of photography – the digital age. Scrapbooks and family albums have largely been shelved for computer discs and memory sticks. Darkrooms are almost a relic. Digital photography even took its toll on Kodak, forcing the company that invented the digital camera, to file for bankruptcy earlier this year.
Digital photography has put its traditional partner on the ropes and landed some sharp shots, but can it deliver the knockout punch? Opinions vary, but there is evidence that, if not quite on the canvas, analog photography is standing on wobbly legs.

LOCAL BUSINESS PINCHED
(PHOTO: Paul Bobkowski, left, talks with fellow photographers as they pick up final orders and square away accounts at PCS. Steven King/Worcester Mag)
As owners of Photographers Color Service (PCS), Patrick O’Toole and Joe Perra have been working with some of the area’s finest photographers for the past 22 years from their space in the back of the building at 10 Harvard St. More than a place to drop off negatives, over the years it became a welcoming haven where like-minded photographers could talk shop, share tricks of the trade or just shoot the breeze. On the last day of July, however, O’Toole and Perra processed their final order – a collection of 20 prints for a 5-by-7-inch photo album. They were victims of both a flattened economy and a digital boom that took much of the work out of their hands.
“It’s a lack of work, a lack of income,” says O’Toole. “We just can’t make a profit. Business has steadily declined since 1992. We’re lucky if we do 300 or 400 rolls of film a year. We used to do that in two days.”
Consumers, he says, started buying digital cameras when they first came out. “By the time professional photographers were convinced to go digital, some customers were already on their third or fourth digital camera.”
As digital cameras grow in popularity and users become more proficient with them, some have started looking beyond the recreational advantages and are seeing the potential of benefiting from them professionally.
“More and more consumers started shooting weddings and calling themselves photographers,” says O’Toole. “When a professional photographer shoots a wedding, he’s using a $4,000 or $8,000 camera. The consumer is using a $500 or $800 camera, but it’s still a pretty good camera and image. The customer doesn’t know the difference. To them, an image is an image.”
Shrewsbury’s Henry Grampietro, another area photographer and longtime PCS customer, says the digital camera has convinced many people they can take quality photographs and not spend the money on a trained professional. “They’re willing to accept lesser quality,” says Grampietro.

WEDDING BUST
Wedding photographers, in particular, have suffered in the digital age. In many cases, the bride and groom are content with a disc with all the images on it. Much to the photographer’s chagrin, the happy couple is more likely to keep the disc and not even bother to have any images printed. Or they will download what they like and correct the photos themselves. Worse, they might order only a fraction of the images taken. “For wedding photographers,” says Perra, “the bottom has dropped out.”
Kim Ramsdell shot her last wedding about 10 to 15 years ago. She and her husband, Charles Poole, own and operate Natural Color, a photo lab in Stoughton. It was one of the first labs to shift completely from optical to digital printing. Optical printing was the rage before computers and the digital age. Moviegoers might not have known it at the time, but when they watched “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” they were seeing the work of optical printers.
“When I would photograph a wedding, I’d shoot 350 exposures,” says Ramsdell. “Those would have to be exposed perfectly. Expressions and lighting is what it was all about. Now you can have 5,000 images at one function. That creates a lack of respect for the file, for the negative, for every time you push the button. Now these guys just hold the shutter down and spend an enormous amount of time editing and throwing away junk.”

THE DIGITAL AGE
Despite their opinions, many traditional photographers bear no hard feelings toward digital cameras and the new wave of photographers. “We’re too old to be resentful,” Perra says. There remains, however, a love/hate relationship between some photographers and the digital age.
Jessica Strom, an accomplished newborn and family portrait photographer in Kansas City, Mo., acknowledges as much on a blog on mcpactions.com, a site dedicated to photo editing. “I love how ‘digital’ has exploded the possibilities of all types of photography, how much control it’s given me over my images, how much it’s allowed me to share and promote my work,” Strom writes. “It’s really made me love photography even more than I already did, which back then, I didn’t even think was possible. But when it comes to my business, to my livelihood, to the manner in which I put food on my table, my love/hate relationship with it really comes into play.”
Strom started noticing she was practically giving away her digital files. Helpful tools like Facebook became an enemy as clients would use the “sneak peeks” Strom would post on her page as their profile pictures and almost never included those photos in their actual orders. The orders themselves were never as big as Strom had anticipated.
The age of digital hasn’t brought all gloom and doom to the photography business. Even the traditionalists acknowledge many positive changes. In fact, even the things they dislike about digital photography, like being able to dramatically alter an image, can also be appealing.
“What I like is how you can manipulate the photo,” says Perra, who also notes you no longer have to spend time processing film. Bobkowski says one huge benefit is being able to see instantly what you just photographed. “There’s no waste,” he says. “What you see is what you get.”

(PHOTO: Patrick O'Toole holds a photo that shows what PCS use to look like. Steven King/Worcester Mag)
O’Toole admits he finds things to like about both the traditional and digital format. “I like traditional photography for its quality, digital for the manipulation. You used to need all this equipment, now you do it on a computer. That’s a big plus. You can restore a picture much easier now.”
Instant gratification has given the photographer greater creative freedom, according to Mary Newman, professor of the Applied Arts Program at Quinsigamond Community College. “It is instant, no darkroom or film, and printing is easy,” says Newman. “One may immediately e-mail or place on the Internet. However, knowing how to take a good photo is another story. One must understand compositional principles. Personally, I had a small digital camera (Lumix) that I used while in India on a mobile hospital tour and was able to shoot photos and videos without making people self-conscious, and was able to capture beautiful and poignant moments.”
More recently, Newman says she was at a 10K race and a woman called out for anyone with a digital camera to catch her husband crossing the finish line in record time. “I caught him crossing the finish line on my cell phone and e-mailed it,” says Newman. “It was a great photo – from a cell phone.”

ADAPTING TO THE TIMES
As a professional photojournalist with Worcester Mag, Steven King’s equipment is higher end – and, of course, digital. He wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love it. Cameras are so much more intelligent than they used to be,” says King. “It’s made it so much easier to come back with a consistent product. Our job is photojournalism. We tell stories and this enables us to tell stories quicker.”
King considers himself a photography traditionalist in that he practices no digital manipulation beyond cropping and slight exposure changes. He doesn’t see digital as having changed what photography means. “It is the same,” says King. “The means for getting the photograph has changed.”
The digital age has also given a reprieve to those whose strengths didn’t lie in the darkroom. “I was never a superstar in the darkroom,” King admits. “Now, with the inception of digital cameras, everything is linked together. You shoot your photo and put it right on the computer to correct it. That saves a lot of time.”
Just as King and other professionals have had to adapt their ways, so too have those in the photo business. And while PCS succumbed to the digital age, the news isn’t completely dire for local photography shops.
(PHOTO: Steve Pond at L.B. Wheaton Camera & Supply. Steven King/Worcester Mag)
L.B. Wheaton Camera & Supply at 259 Park Ave. has been in Worcester for 119 years, opening in downtown Worcester in 1893. It relocated to Lincoln Plaza in 1956 and has been at its current location since around 1996. President and owner Steve Pond has been with the company for 30 years and he knows that, had he not made some adjustments along the way, his shop could just as easily have suffered the same fate as PCS.
“If I didn’t invest in the equipment at the time I did,” Pond says, “I might be in their shoes. There used to be 10 camera shops in Worcester, now there’s one. We’ve survived. We kept up with the changes.” Pond installed a digital lab last year, but he has not completely abandoned the traditional form. He still has a C-41 developer that processes 35mm color negative film.

IN THE DARK
There are, in fact, still darkrooms to be found – and traditional film photography is still taught and practiced. The Bancroft School here in Worcester still has a darkroom, as do several area colleges, including Clark University, where two of the best in the business teach their trade.
Stephen DiRado, a lecturer at Clark who specializes in black-and-white film photography, says many students attending the school for art do so because it has a darkroom. He believes teaching the analog method provides students a better understanding of how to build a good digital image. “Because of the limitations of film, and discipline needed to make a good black-and-white print, students have to think through a number of levels about their intentions— previsualize the resulting photograph,” says DiRado. “By the time they enroll in a digital class they adapt quickly to its set of technical standards. It is within our intermediate classes that we open the field for whatever camera or material is needed to best express one’s vision. Students can mix analog with digital freely, at this point it is all about the best tools to get the job done.“
DiRado’s colleague, Frank Armstrong, echoes his sentiments, saying time spent in the darkroom only enhances the understanding and appreciation of 20thcentury photographs. Armstrong does not see film photography going into the dark just yet. “While analog photography is diminished, it is not dead,” he says. “My guess is it will continue for a couple more decades. I strongly feel that learning the processes of analog photography put people in touch with how photographic images have been made essentially since photography had its beginnings.”

(PHOTO: Frank Armstrong in the photo department at Clark University. Steven King/Worcester Mag)
Before they get to college, some area high school students have the opportunity to work in a darkroom. The Bancroft School and its art department offer both traditional film and digital photography. As recently as last winter, one student won honorable mention at the Boston Globe Scholastic Art and Writing Awards show for her work with black-and-white film. Her teacher, Richard Dec, who heads the school’s art department, agrees with Armstrong that the traditional form of photography is not dead, but offers a caveat. “I have been to several training workshops and have had several instructors who said color film photography is dead,” Dec says. “Digital is much faster and easier and you’re not using any polluting chemicals. But there are still professional photographers doing black-and-white film. They still say you can’t get the quality of tone in digital that you can with film.”
Dec believes digital has pretty much caught up with black-and-white photography and considers himself a true convert to the digital age, even though as a college student in the early 1970s he was exposed strictly to film. Despite falling in love with digital photography, Dec sees a benefit to teaching traditional film.
“Our philosophy is to teach our lessons through art history,” he says, “and, of course, that includes film. What better way to teach all forms of photography than working in them?”

BREAKING INTO THE BUSINESS
Whether they favor the traditional or digital form, most photographers can agree on one thing: the art of photography should continue and new photographers should be encouraged. Just as today’s old-school photographers started somewhere, new camera bugs will emerge–maybe from schools like Bancroft and Clark University. They’ll just be learning some new tricks of a drastically changed trade.
The key, according to Strom, is to learn the craft. “Starting a photography business seems easy enough and the inexperienced are doing just that at a record pace,” she says. “People will soon realize, though, that true photography isn’t the editing; it’s the shot you take in camera and unless you can nail that, you may as well call yourself a photoshopper, not a photographer. Take the time to learn your digital camera, to distinguish light and read histograms to determine exposure. Create images that look outstanding blown up to a 24-by- 30 canvas, not an itty bitty image on the computer that you may think looks amazing. You only realize how much or little you’ve learned once it’s blown up and staring at you in the face.”
Old style or new, the photographer should never stop learning, says DiRado. “Never forget what inspired you to pick up a camera,” he says. “If you go the art route, never stop working. Learn from all of your mistakes. And study the visual arts. Photography is not an exclusive club; it uses the same language as all of the other visual arts. If you are going the commercial route, do all of the above, and intern for somebody you admire for a few years, work for free if you must, and keenly study and learn everything they do. In time, you will eventually make it your own, and do it better. And never stop being a student. Continue to be inspired by many resources.”
Armstrong offers one more, crucial piece of advice: “Make sure you have a broad educational background, a good beginning photographic skill set that can be matured and a good business plan – and lots of money because digital photography is expensive. It is expensive to obtain the necessary tools and to maintain those tools.”
When the fledgling photographer finally does step out onto the stage, he or she shouldn’t be surprised if someone like Bobkowski is there to lend a helping hand. Like O’Toole and Perra, Bobkowski isn’t a digital hater. Even when he is out shooting a wedding and several other people are snapping photos with their pocket cameras and cell phones and iPods – and even though he knows that will likely cut into his earnings – Bobkowski isn’t about to pull an ego trip and tell the bride and groom no one else should be allow to take pictures.
“I’m getting paid to shoot. If there are other people shooting, why should I tell the father of the bride he shouldn’t take a picture of his daughter? I would even tell them how to set up the camera.”

NOT DEAD YET
The question remains: Has the digital age scored a knockout punch against traditional film photography? By virtue of the fact that there remain an army of dedicated photographers outfitted with old-fashioned film cameras – and the fact that students still flock to high school and college darkrooms – it seems premature to write up an obituary.
But people like Strom see it as inevitable. “There will come a time in the near future where it’s next to impossible to find a place to buy film let alone develop it,” she says. “The world is in a state of instant gratitude and isn’t stopping. Even kids barely able to speak want to see their picture on the back of the camera as soon as it’s taken.”
Strom’s opinion doesn’t have a lot of company on the local camera scene. O’Toole, for one, thinks there will always be a place for the hard copy of a photograph. “I don’t think it’s going to die,” he says. “There are still people that value the photograph.”
Armstrong, too, is not ready to sound the death knell. “In some ways,” he says, “asking that question is like asking will oil painting die off just because acrylics came along. I see them existing side-by-side for some years to come.”
DiRado is even more emphatic. There is, he says, a counter-culture of youngsters who have taken to older cameras. And there are still enough people who don’t want to live life in the fast lane. Traditional photography, says DiRado, will be around for a while. “It is alive and well within groups of artists who want to slow down,” he says. “Hipsters seem to have found it to be part of their identity. I have never seen so many teens and 20-somethings on the street as in recent times carrying around 35mm cameras. These are the same people signing up for our analog classes at Clark. Ten years ago people ran up to me on the streets, mocking me for still carrying around such a beast of a camera – 40 pounds of bellows, film holders, lens and tripod. Now, people stop me in awe to inquire about the camera. I am very amused by it all. Analog is here to stay for some time to come as an ‘art thing.’ Free from the stress and expectations that digital covers all so well in the commercial world.”