A career of firsts starting 45 years ago

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in the newspaper business for 45 years. For six of those years I technically worked for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Delaware, but I kept my streak alive as a freelance writer and photographer.

As I get older, I sometimes find it hard to remember what happened yesterday, but I can remember my first photography assignment in the early 1970s – a youth fishing tournament on Williams Pond in Seaford working for The Leader and State Register, which no longer exists.

I was handed a Nikon F that at the time was considered a state-of-the-art camera. It didn’t have a light meter – I’m sure some of you are wondering what that is – so I had to use a hand-held meter to set the F-stop and shutter speed.

Introduced in 1959, the Nikon F was Nikon’s first single-lens reflex camera.

The first Nikon I owned was was a Nikkormat, which was a cheaper version of the flagship Nikon F. In high school, I was given a Minolta Hi-Matic F as a gift, and I used that rangefinder for many years. I think I still have it stored away in a box.

I can remember the first photo I took with that camera. I still have a print of the shot looking up through a large electric tower. The lines and angles fascinated me.

I started my career in the darkroom, which is a pretty good place to start to learn the basics. Developing trays, film developing tanks, steel reels and enlargers are relics of the past except to a few purists out there.

As printing technology progressed, in the mid-1990s I talked my editor into using color photos from time to time on the front page. Developing that first roll of color film was like opening the curtain on another world.

Color in newspapers is so commonplace today, no one thinks anything of it.

To be honest, I can't recall my first digital photo assignment. But I do recall the clunky Sony MVC camera in the early 2000s that stored photos on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. It was a far, far cry from what we use today.

Among other firsts – replacing the typewriter with an Apple computer and doing away with hands-on page composition and moving to computer pagination, which in turn led to the demise of the darkroom.

Of all the advances in technology, the internet and email have to rank near the top as the biggest game changers.

Then in later years, it became possible to file and post stories and photos from remote locations. Then smart phones took those capabilities to another level.

Change in the newspaper biz has been dramatic over the past four decades. I can't imagine that vast degree of change can occur over the next few decades. But who knows what other firsts are still out there.