Published in the September 17-30, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
In the days before film cameras, newspapers often hired artists to provide drawings of dramatic news events such as military battles or steamship explosions. It was a tedious process that took a lot of time to enhance print news stories. And then along came William Henry Fox Talbot.
It’s hard to imagine news these days without stories illustrated by images in photographs. Talbot helped to provide the basic photography technology that lets readers of news see for themselves what their national leaders look like, a crime scene or other visual aspects of news reporting.
I spent a rainy afternoon in Talbot’s English home in the village of Lacock Abbey where he experimented with developing photographic negatives as a way to capture light for a realistic image on print.
The tour guide took my group to the south gallery of the home where we stood at the oriel window Talbot used as his first test in 1835 in experimenting with the technology he was developing for photographic illustration.
Talbot’s photographic technology helped shape the world as we know it. With black-and-white and later color images, people could learn about news events with greater detail and accuracy than from any artist’s renderings. And with the development of moving images on strips of film and later video technology, people’s understanding of local and global news events grew even greater.
At this month’s Morgan Hill Photography Club meeting, Morgan Hill Life editor Robert Airoldi and I gave a workshop on how the techniques of photojournalism can be applied to hobby photographs. I’m a “Doctor Who” fan and so I used the well-known British TV science-fiction character to illustrate how I think of photography.
I was inspired by a recent episode of the BBC show where the doctor visited the National Gallery in London and discovered a secret vault that contained photographs of an alien world. But these were not your usual photographs. These were three-dimensional pictures that a person could step into and see an instant in time of that other world.
Standing in front of the club members, I showed them the Canon SX50 camera I often use for photographic work in Morgan Hill Life.
I compared it to Doctor Who’s TARDIS. If you’re unfamiliar with the television show, the TARDIS looks on the outside like an old-fashioned police call box. But inside, it’s much bigger, holding a labyrinth of passages and a whimsical control room. It’s much more than a mere spaceship. It can travel to points anywhere in the universe or to other eras of history.
TARDIS stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space. And this can also describe what a camera does. If you think of it, a camera is a small box that can capture light by the abrupt opening and closing of its door – its lens – on a frame of film or on a digital sensor for memory card storage. It turns those photons of light into images. But a camera does far more than that. It really captures a moment of time. In a sense, like Doctor Who’s police call box, it provides people with a way to “visit” the past and see for themselves a moment in history.
In regards to the “Relative Dimension in Space,” a camera is able to take three-dimensional space and smash it down into a two-dimensional image. Not only that, the relative size of the scenery or object being photographed is changed in the image. A photographer can use his or her camera to put Morgan Hill’s El Toro Mountain on an image that can be held it a child’s hand — or printed on newspaper pages.
Like the TARDIS, the world inside of a camera can seem much bigger than the small box it appears to be on the outside. The inventor Talbot created a TARDIS, er, camera technology that, like Doctor Who, can take photojournalists on adventures they can share with the world.
