My friend, AP Staff Photographer Chuck
Burton posted on his status that his Canon 70-200 zoom lens, stopped
working an hour before tonight's Bobcats basketball game. It got me
thinking about my years with the Associated Press, when I was
covering the Indiana University Hoosiers, back in 1975-76.
We shot black and white images and made
prints. The AP had furnished the Bloomington photographer with an
ancient drum transmitter. It was either a Model 300 or it was number
300. It had a heavy power supply that ran on tubes, and the basic
technology was current by 1870's standards for “facsimile
transmissions by rotary drum”. We had a dedicated phone network,
and you had to holler into a handset when you heard the droning
signal stop, to offer your picture up. You had to establish a
reputation with the picture editors at the hub, which in our case was
Chicago. They would schedule you into the queue.
We would shoot the first half of the
games at Assembly Hall, rush back to the darkroom,process the film, edit the
negatives, and make a print just as fast as possible. Then you typed
a caption on to paper which had glue on the back. You could actually
transmit a wet print, stretched around drum with the caption attached
by the glue.
After the Hoosiers started winning
consistently, we developed a rapport with the editors as we shouted a
basic description of picture and we waited for them to tell us to “go
ahead, final” when we hit the transmission button and a small white
light would start recording the image, line for line, and sending it
as a tone over the phone network. The folks in Chicago would route it
to the interested papers, say in Iowa and Indiana when the Big-Ten
season began. A really good basketball picture would be routed to New
York to “go around” meaning all AP member papers received the
image.
That was some heady stuff for a second
year Journalism student.
Well to bring this thought around to a
conclusion, we got a reputation for great basketball pictures of the
Nation's Best basketball team with Bobby Knight's antics a bonus.
Because the Hoosiers were number one, our pictures all went around.
We had students like myself, and Donald Winslow, and Shawn Spence all
shooting the best pictures of the best team. Before long, all we had
to say was “Bloomington split New York” and desk editor would
reply, “Go ahead, Final Bloomington, give us your two best early”
We rarely sent more than two pictures anyway.
It wasn't long till we started printing
on RC paper, which like a piece of plastic, and the AP had embarked
on the “Laserphoto” period. This new machine didn't smell like an
electric train on Christmas morning, like our old drum when it was
hot enough to keep pizza warm. This new slick technology was State of
the Art. That was what we used until negative transmitters came on
board in the 1980's, which begot Digital Camera Systems in the early
1990s. And with these new fangled cameras came new technology based
on secure Internet networks. Gone were the two-wire phone hook-ups,
and now we are broadband.
My most recent employer, Reuters sent
me a $25,000 Leafax color negative transmitter during the Clinton
administration, and now it is a lead weight in my living room. We had
already started using a Phoenix One system, and later laptops
replaced the one-off technology of the Phoenix.
So Chuck, I feel for you without the
zoom tonight, but at least your fingernails are not stained with
Dektol and you won't smell like fixer tonight. Maybe a good cigar,
but no fixer.
(This blog is dedicated to my mentors, the late Jim Schweiker of United Press International, and my boss at the AP, Indianapolis Staffer Chuck Robinson to whom I owe a great debt.)
