Remembering Travels and the Tactile Joy of Working with Non-Digital Images

Photo: (Above) Sunset and storm clouds over a dirt road and layered sandstone rock cliffs in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah

Remembering Past Travels Through the American West and the Tactile Joy of Working with Non-Digital Images

2020 continues to be an ‘interesting’ year to say the least. The global pandemic has affected us all in a variety of ways, and here in the US, we’ve just had another very divided Presidential election. For myself, after watching a year’s worth of travel plans fizzle out along with other unrelated issues, I decided to take a physical and mental step back from the ‘business’ of photography. Hitting the pause button allowed me some breathing room to reaccess priorities and start planning a bit of a personal and business reset. Recently, I came across a file folder in my office filled with the last submission of original 35mm transparencies (slides) sent to my stock agents.

With plans to build a new Southwest Photo Gallery on my website in the near future, and with the time I had available, I finally decided to tackle the project of scanning these older pictures. While I no longer invest my energies in the stock photo marketplace, I would at least be able to include them in my searchable digital archive.

Morning ground fog and clearing storm clouds at Balanced Rock, Arches National Park, Utah.

“See Me. Feel Me. Touch Me.”

I haven’t worked with my slide files in a while, but I was quickly reminded how much fun it was to handle images; to physically see, touch, and move images in three dimensions, to feel tactile sensations like making stacks of slides, holding a slide up to a window, or sliding them in and out of plastic sleeves.

Aside from getting an occasional photo print from the lab, folks who began their photographic pursuits following the digital revolution never really knew or will appreciate the sensation of working with your images by touching them. *Gasp!* Moving digital files from one folder to another on your computer just isn’t the same as digging through file cabinets or moving slides across a lightbox. If you wanted to examine your image in detail, you had to use a loupe, not just double-click an icon of a magnifying glass. If you wanted photo editors or art buyers to see your work, you needed to pack up sleeves filled with original or duplicate transparencies (or 8×10 prints) and ship them off to clients via Fedex or UPS. There was no ‘attach files to email’ instantaneous solution.

“Back in my day…”

I was also reminded how you could go weeks on a trip between the moment you pressed the shutter and that first instant of seeing the resulting photograph. To work at a professional level, you had to know how to use your tools and creativity to get the image you wanted without the luxury of chimping away on a camera-back LCD. If you wanted a quick idea of what you’d get, you needed to shoot a polaroid and make adjustments based on that. The concept of “Getting it right in-camera,” separated the men from the boys and the women from the girls. You didn’t need to spend hours sitting at a computer, because once your slides were developed, that was pretty much it; the image was what it was.

What follows below are a few samples of these older images. They are a literal trip back in time for me. Like riding a horse, it was lots of fun to reminisce about the good-ol’ days. Those days came with their own sights, smells, and feelings… but I don’t miss them that much. I love seeing my images right away and being able to them to friends, family, or post on social media minutes after clicking the shutter. I may not like the hours spent sitting at a computer processing hundreds of images from a long trip, but I love not having to buy bricks (100 rolls) of film at a time. Likewise, I love horses, I love riding them. But I am glad I don’t need to saddle up every time I need to go to the store.

 

Fog shrouds the “Priest and Nuns” after a fall storm in Castle Valley, Utah

The Tech:

For those young photographers out there who never worked with film, these images are just as they were created out in the field; there was no fixing it later in Photoshop, and certainly no easy-bake Instagram Filters. Most all of these images were shot on Fuji Velvia RVP-135/50-36 Professional slide film with the one exception of the Moonrise over East Temple which was shot on Kodachrome 25. The images were scanned using a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000ED at 4000 dpi and converted to 16-bit Master TIFF files at 12″x 18″ at 300 dpi. The only photoshop corrections was primarily a wee bit of color balance and contrast curve adjustments with the goal of making the scans look like the original slides – and there was a very good reason for that. Back in the day, just as the internet, email, and the very first digital cameras began to shape our business world, you could send a small preview scan of an image to photo editors by email, and if they wanted to use the image, you would send them the original slide for reproduction. One super-easy way to piss off a photo-editor was to send them a slide that didn’t look like the preview scan.

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For more info or to purchase an image, click on the image to order through my Image Archive, or simply contact me directly.

I’d love to hear if you have a favorite image(s). If so, please consider leaving me a comment below to let me know which one(s) caught your attention.

Storm clouds at sunset over Cholla cactus on the high plateau near Santa Fe, New Mexico

Morning ground fog and clouds over rock pinnacles in the Windows Section at Arches National Park, Moab, Utah

Sunlight and sandstone rock detail in Upper Antelope Slot Canyon, Navajo Nation, near Page, Arizona

Morning storm clouds over Lake Powell, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, near Page, Arizona

View over canyons at sunrise from Grand View Point, Island in the Sky District, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Moonrise over the East Temple, Zion National Park, Utah

Young bull calf grazing in Purple Scorpionweed wildflowers at Valley of the Gods, near Mexican Hat, Utah

Sunlight and sandstone rock detail in Upper Antelope Slot Canyon, Navajo Nation, near Page, Arizona

Sunset over Las Vegas, Nevada

Evening storm clouds over a plateau, Island in the Sky District, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Overlooking the Fiery Furnace region, Arches National Park, Utah

Backlit cliffs from Shafer Canyon Overlook, Island in the Sky District, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Sunset light on cliffs above the Colorado River at Horseshoe Bend, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Page, Arizona

And finally, here’s a Behind the Scenes look at how the slides appear on a lightbox:

 

Wow, thanks so much for making it all the way through these pictures! Hopefully, you enjoyed looking at them.

Again, it’d be great if you’d leave a comment below letting me know which image(s) caught your attention the most.   🙂

 

Cheers and thanks so much for looking,

~ Gary.

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Gary Crabbe is an award-winning commercial and editorial outdoor travel photographer and author based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, California. He has seven published books on California to his credit, including “Photographing California; v1-North”, which won the prestigious 2013 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal Award as Best Regional title. His client and publication credits include the National Geographic Society, the New York Times, Forbes Magazine, TIME, The North Face, Subaru, L.L. Bean, Victoria’s Secret, Sunset Magazine, The Nature Conservancy, and many more. In 2018, The USPS selected a nearly-unprecedented seven of Gary’s photographs to become U.S. Postage ‘Forever’ Stamps as part of the O Beautiful collection. Gary is also a photography instructor and consultant, offering both public and private photo workshops, as well as being a professional Photo Editor and Content Creator.

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