I WAS TAUGHT photography many years ago in the days of film. I started taking pictures when you had to know what “speed” of film to buy to suit the kind of assignment you were undertaking.
I am from the days when the largest roll of film you could get from the store contained just 36 exposures, so you had to frame your scene well and set your aperture and shutter speed according to light conditions and the degree of motion involved.
And film was expensive, so you did not shoot 20 images of the same scene in order to get just one like today’s picture takers with automatic cameras and data cards that can hold hundreds of pictures. A good photographer learnt the art of bracketing – shoot, the first at the setting your knowledge dictated, then move the setting up one position and shoot, then down one and shoot again. Among those three you should get a decent picture technically.
Back then you were not considered a good photographer if you could not operate in a black and white darkroom. That meant you had to be able to open your film roll in total darkness, spool it onto a reel in darkness, fill the canister with chemicals, time it, remove it, wash it and dry it.
Following that you had to learn how to take one sheet of photographic paper from the box without letting any light in to spoil the whole batch, get it under the enlarger, onto which you would have already loaded the negative and decided which exposure you want to print.
You were a boss photographer when you could use your hands so skilfully in the art of dodging and burning that you could expose certain sections of the image to more or less light to compensate for any “deficiencies” while you were shooting. Finally, you had to determine how long that paper should remain in the liquid developer before being dipped in a stop bath and then transferred to the fixer tray to get the perfect outcome.
It was not like today when you set the camera on automatic, point and shoot, go to the menu button and transmit that picture to your laptop or tablet and from there to the world, all in less than a minute with not a chance of staining your clothing with any harsh chemicals.
Those “good old days” came back to me recently when a friend sent me via Whatsapp the picture at left. I was intrigued when I first saw it. I thought: how smart! Somebody somewhere in rural Barbados could not put up with the potholes in their district any longer so they decided to fill them in – with banana trees.
It hit me then that if this took off, given the number of potholes in our roads, and the size of some, we could be self sufficient in bananas in no time. It would also be a new tourist attraction that would make us stand out on sites such as TripAdvisor – a banana drive thru.
But just as quickly it occurred to me this might not be Barbados at all and the picture might not be real. This is the age of Photoshop and anyone with limited computer skills, who might never have held a camera, can “create” the perfect picture.
But still, I like it – banana trees to fill potholes. We might still be able to get agriculture back on track without having to plough a single field.
