I re-member the good ol' days with the AP

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.)