Nowadays, taking a photo is easy – you just need to press a button on your smartphone. If you need better quality, you can buy a digital camera. The advantage of digital photos is that you can immediately look at them and evaluate how they turned out.
And in the times of the USSR, taking a photograph was a whole process. You could say it was a ritual.
First, you needed a camera. You had to understand what parameters to set. Exposure, shutter speed, aperture, focal length. You can’t make a mistake in any parameter – the photo won’t work, or it won’t be clear. Film was inserted into the camera. You won’t get a photo until you shoot all the film. Then you had to develop the film, print the photos, and only then you could see and understand what happened.
The Soviet industry produced a large number of cameras.
Cameras in the USSR (Unsplash License)
Secondly, special devices and chemicals were needed to print the photos. An enlarger, a developer, a fixer. Some stages of photo creation took place in the dark. Some – under a red lamp. All this took quite a lot of time.
The most interesting thing about this process was that you had to photograph essentially twice. First, onto film. You got a negative (black and white swapped places in black-and-white photography. In color photography, the colors changed, for example, blue became yellow). Then you photographed from the film a second time onto photographic paper. With simultaneous enlargement of the image. And then you got a positive.
Taking photos, printing photos – this was also often a hobby. For example, we had a photography club in our pioneer house.
Later, photo printing machines appeared – this automated all processes, but at the same time killed all the romance. Now even this is not necessary. Everyone has a camera in their pocket built into their phone.