The Alchemy of Light
Before photography became data and screens, it was chemistry and wonder. One photographer revisits the days when every image emerged like a small miracle.
Story and photographs copyright © Rich Turner.
Steven Spielberg summed it up nicely when he said digital photography is science, and film is a chemical miracle.
In an age defined by extraordinary technological advancement, many of us still feel a quiet pull toward what we fondly call “the good old days.” It’s that pang of nostalgia that surfaces when we think of an old car we once owned — replaced long ago by something faster, smarter, more efficient — yet we can still imagine ourselves behind its wheel, cruising down familiar streets with the windows down.
I feel the same way about photography. Maybe you gave up your old film camera years ago for something digital that promised speed and endless options. And sure, it delivered. But then you open a box of old prints from the film days—real photographs made with light, chemistry, and a little patience—and it all comes rushing back. Holding those prints, I’m reminded that progress is great. I don’t miss the old days, but I still feel a sincere reverence for the quiet magic of how it all started.
Since 1967, photography has been my full-time profession, so I really had no choice but to convert to digital about twenty-five years ago. Even though clients were beginning to request it, I was reluctant to make the switch. I felt confident and comfortable with the craft I had practiced for so long. The learning curve was steep at first, but it didn’t take long for the digital revolution to prove its worth. Compared to the old ways—well, there really is no comparison. It’s harder now to make a technically bad picture, and we know instantly whether we’ve captured what we intended.
Still, I occasionally find myself drawn back to my analog days, revisiting some of those “chemical miracle” photographs. As I remember each step from exposure to finished print, I can’t help but wonder how we ever found the time. Yet each image carries its own story—its challenges and the scene or subject that first caught my eye. Many feelings come rushing back, but the one that stands out most is the uncertainty: the suspense of not knowing whether the photograph would turn out as hoped until the print slowly emerged in the developer tray.
With film, there were so many variables in those chemical baths that even the pros never knew exactly what they were going to get. Film had a mind of its own—temperamental, unpredictable, and totally unforgiving if you blew the exposure or messed up the processing. If something went wrong, that image was gone, period. So there was always that moment of relief, even a little joy, when you looked at a strip of negatives or slides and realized most of them actually turned out just fine.
For me, the anticipation of film photography was always double-edged. Part of it was the unique beauty of the process itself; the other part was the constant, nagging doubt that something might have gone wrong along the way. We learned to work with what we had, waiting patiently—sometimes two days or more—to see the results return from the color lab. At the newspaper, we waited anxiously as negatives dried just enough to handle. Film had its own character, its own aesthetic, and occasionally its own way of breaking your heart. It kept me on edge back then, but that tension is something I now remember with a certain fondness.
To understand that relationship fully, a little history helps. The first permanent photographic image was produced in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in France. His process was not for everyone: it required hours of exposure in bright daylight using a pinhole camera obscura. In 1839, Louis Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype, which soon became the first popular and commercially successful photographic process.
In 1888, George Eastman brought together the advancements that came before him and introduced both a word and a camera that would soon become universal: Kodak. By making photographic roll film common and affordable, he ushered in a new era of visual storytelling. Since then, photography has seen a steady stream of advancements in processes, materials, and equipment.
The relative newcomer in this long history was the invention of the first digital camera—created by an engineer working for, you guessed it, Eastman Kodak. The first photograph produced with this handheld camera took twenty-three seconds to record and was stored on a cassette tape. The only way to view it was on a television set. Its inventor, Steven Sasson, then just twenty-four, later recalled Kodak’s reaction in Time magazine:
“They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set. Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?”
Since Kodak was the dominant player in the U.S. photographic industry at that time, the company was reluctant to see the potential of this early prototype. Neither were they enthusiastic about cannibalizing their other businesses in favor of this unproven, unique technology. They eventually did make the huge switch to digital in 1993, quite a bit later than their more forward thinking competition.
Whether ironically or predictably, the Eastman Kodak Company filed for bankruptcy in 2012. They made it through bankruptcy by shrinking way down and finding a few solid niches, but it never really found its way back to being the Kodak it once was.
As I became old enough to click a shutter sometime in the 1950s, wasting film was not in my family’s budget. The first camera I got to use on occasion was a 1926 Agfa Ansco Clipper size 616 film (discontinued) which might sit around for weeks before that last exposure was made. I don’t remember its arrival, but eventually a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye became another early family camera. We could only guess what pictures were on those rolls of film, some taken by Mom, some by my older brothers George and Tom, and me. It was always a surprise when we opened the yellow Kodak envelope to marvel over and pick out our own finished prints picked up from the drugstore.
My dad, not all that interested in still photography, enjoyed the short-lived 8mm movie craze of the 1950s. Unfortunately, the slow, low-ISO film of the day demanded floodlights for indoor movies that were bright enough to interrogate a suspect. One of my favorite childhood memories is Dad roaming around the house on New Year’s Eve, tethered to a long extension cord, filming guests who were gamely shielding their eyes from his portable sunrise while trying not to trip over the cord snaking across the floor. It still makes me smile. To this day, I’m not entirely sure everyone left that party with their eyebrows intact.
When I was about eight or nine, my cousin Robert showed me how to make a contact print in his makeshift hobby darkroom that could only be used at night. It was in an old barn and daylight would stream in through all the cracks in the weathered wood siding, rendering it unusable in the daytime. I had to stand on a box just to see into the sink while he slipped the print paper gently into what looked to me like water under the red safelight. Unforgettable is the only way I can describe my astonishment as I witnessed, at first a ghostly apparition, then gradually a more distinct image as it came to life right before my boyhood eyes. Spielberg’s so-named “chemical miracle” in common practice.
Later on, lucky me, I received an enlarger for Christmas. My first darkroom doubled as the family bathroom despite my older brothers’ frequent, and sometimes urgent, knocks on the door pleading for quick access. My interest in photography seemed to rejuvenate my dad’s, at least enough to pay attention to the prints I was making from negatives shot in my high school photography class. One Saturday afternoon he told me to hop in the car, that he’d found a decent used camera he thought I’d like to have. Off we went to the camera store and I became the proud owner of my first 35mm camera with manual controls, a 1950s era Minolta. Not long after that, Dad saw this as a way out of his responsibility as “official family photographer” by promoting me to that lofty position. That little camera got me through high school and I don’t remember what became of it. Countless rolls of film were processed and printed in that family bathroom/darkroom.
Nine or ten years after experiencing that first darkroom apparition, the US Navy saw fit to make me a professional photographer. Three years of high school photography, plus that camera and enlarger (thanks Mom & Dad!), helped to cement that deal. Nearly sixty years later I’m still making pictures, albeit much more technologically advanced than when I began my career.
I was a photojournalist at the Stockton Record newspaper for sixteen years and even on my busiest days of meeting those daily deadlines, with the likes of Bonnie Raitt and Mick Jagger blasting through the speakers keeping the beat of the burn and dodge rhythm while exposing the enlargements, this chemical miracle was a phenomenon I continued to marvel at. The darkroom dance, I called it.
Dodging and burning are techniques used during the printing process to manipulate the exposure of select areas on a photographic print that differs from the rest of the image’s exposure. Follow the link for more detail.
These days all we need to do is “chimp” our images on the screens of our phones or camera backs and we have a pretty good proof. Chimping refers to the habit photographers have of checking photos on digital displays immediately after capture — it’s an acronym for CHeck IMage Preview.
Early in my new commercial endeavors after opening my own studio in 1990, I began shooting Polaroid proofs to catch any setup, composition or exposure concerns. It was prior to the digital revolution so you could say it was my way of “chimping” before there was such a term. The magical mystery of film is all but gone in the digital age.
Since about 2001 I’ve been totally involved in digital workflows in my business, from initial capture to final output. After getting a little experience with this new and mysterious medium, I knew it was here to stay. And, as entrenched I was in the old analog ways of doing things, I realized its many benefits. Now, I would never consider going back to the analog days. Heck, the phone camera in my pocket rivals my Nikons in many ways. And now I have almost infinite control from the photo shoot to client delivery, whether digital files or physical prints. Plus, no film to buy and precess. I can fit hundreds of high resolution images on the two digital cards in my camera. No longer am I at the mercy of lab technicians interpreting my creative intentions. For better or worse, I’m totally responsible for the finished product.
Before I close, there’s one small memory from my early digital days that still makes me smile—and shake my head a little.
I remained skeptical—and very much a novice—despite all the reading I’d done. Rather than plunge into digital with an outrageously expensive camera, I eased in by buying a Nikon film scanner, an Epson Stylus Photo R2400 printer, and a box of Epson glossy paper. After nearly twenty years in the darkroom, I’d learned the hard way that opening light-sensitive materials in daylight is an excellent way to ruin them. So you can imagine my hesitation sitting at my desk, bathed in ordinary office light, staring at that box of inkjet paper. It felt wrong. Completely unnatural. It actually took me a while before I could bring myself to open printing paper in full daylight without silently panicking like a rookie all over again.
Then came the moment that changed my attitude. When that first digital print, above, finally rolled off the printer, I fully expected a disaster. I had chosen a scanned Fujichrome medium format transparency — an aerial view of downtown Stockton looking west — in which every tiny detail, including a ship in the Port of Stockton’s turning basin, must be sharp. To my amazement (and mild disbelief), the print was practically flawless. I stared at it for a long moment, half-expecting it to scold me for messing it up, and then laughed—realizing I’d survived the leap, digital had officially won me over, and, miraculously, no paper had been harmed in the making of this photograph.
From then on, archival pigment digital prints, made in my office without the need for a darkroom, have made up a large part of my commercial business.
There’s a certain memory that always lingers for me—the sharp, tangy whiff of acetic acid that greeted me whenever I stepped into the darkroom during those romantic, unpredictable days of film photography. With that nostalgia in mind, I’d like to share a small selection of images drawn from my analog files.
All of these, along with several full filing cabinets worth, were captured on traditional light-sensitive films. The black-and-whites are all Kodak Tri-X, originally processed and printed by hand for newspaper publication by yours truly. The color photographs were handled by professional labs to produce prints and transparencies. For online presentation, I scanned the negatives and slides using a Nikon LS-8000 ED or Epson V850, preserving a digital duplicate of their original analog character.
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Award-winning photographer, Rich Turner, explored, photographed, and aerial photo-mapped Antarctica as a Navy photographer, was a newspaper photojournalist for 19 years, and has operated his own fine art photography studio since 1990. “Delta Grandeur,” his traveling exhibit, toured California museums and libraries for 5 years. His most recent passion is spreading the word far and wide about what an amazing place the Delta and Greater Bay Area is. With the help of very talented writers, artists and photographers, publishing this magazine seems a good way to do that.
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Thank you, Rich Turner, for sharing your jaw dropping professional photos over many decades. Stockton is lucky to have you. You and
Tim Ulmer, who now has a photo lab on the Miracle Mile business district, are both jewels of our city and county.
Gene Beley