Resumes
The Business Insider has an article about a guy producing photos for a daily newspaper using an iPhone for a camera & Instagram for editing. Granted, daily newspaper photography isn't usually great, yesterday's papers are used for lining bird cages, washing windows & drop cloths etc…. But is using a phone & Instagram something to put on a resume?
The skills needed to put a picture in the paper used to mean something and there were a lot of skills & tools needed to get that picture into ink on paper. First, you needed a camera (& a guy who could use it)Then you needed a darkroom to develop the film.Then an enlarger to make your photo print. Then you needed to get a halftone made which required a process cameraThese suckers required 2 rooms & then another darkroom to develop the film. To make the halftone dots on the film, you would mout a glass plate in front of the film. The glass plate had cross hatched diagonal lines scribed into it. All this photographic work was done by hand - no processors.
If you wanted to do local tone manipulation on the image there were a number of "dodge and burn" techniques available to the photographer but at this stage, the job would go to a dot etcher.I couldn't find a picture of a dot etcher but every one I knew was a little off, so this one will do. They would live up to their name by applying a weak solution of potassium ferricyanide to the film to "etch" the dots on the film. Then the film would go to a stripper (I couldn't find an acceptable image) & then on to a platemakerand then off to the press.
It was a long & tedious job & took not only a lot of people to do it but a lot of people to make the tools & materials to make it all work. Now a guy snaps the pic, sloshes it into a layout program, sends it to the press & a plate is burned, processed & mounted and printing commences.
It was a strange feeling when I saw my darkroom dismantled. I started to understand the saying, "I've forgot more than you'll ever know".
A&B, Dektol, Rubylith, Wratten 1A, Robertson, Crosfield, Scitex, dragon's blood, that weird photo transfer product whose name I forget? PMS? PMT?
Putting this crap on a resume would just confuse the average HR clown nowadays.

How the Pope Affected My LifePrinting is weird. It has it's own measuring systems and those aren't universal or even constant. Points, picas and the worst - columns…
Back in the 70s I worked at an engraving shop. The owner was raised Baptist in West Virginia but wasn't much of a practitioner. His wife was in volved in, as his brother told me, "that church, if you can even call it a church…", or, as most people refer to it, the Catholic Church. I was raised Presbo.
So, the local Catholic chapter had a newsletter that was printed letterpress & Charlie did engravings for 'em for free. One day they brought in a photo of the new pope, John Paul I & gave me dimensions for the halftone measured in columns. I had to ask what the hell a column was & I set out to determine the size of the reproduction. It worked out to about 10x12". Kinda big, but it was the head of the church & it was a church publication, so, ok….. I made the halftone, passed it off to Charlie's "if you can call it a church" brother & he made the big ass plate.
When the printer received the plate he said something along the lines of WTF?!? He came back and admitted he had given us the wrong info, apologized and asked us to make another smaller plate. We did, but only after Charlie screamed at me for making an obviously oversized halftone. The printer was somehow blameless, Charlie's brother was somehow blameless - it was the kid's fault.
The thing about this pope was, he was only in office a few weeks when he died. So, about a month later, we had a new request for an engraving of the pope's, John Paul II, picture for this newsletter. Much fact checking this time around.
I was so young & so ignorant of Catholic affairs, I remember thinking, "How often do these guys get new popes? Are they all called Paul? How often are e going to go through this?"
Anyway, everybody mentioned in this story, including the engraving shop, is dead.

The world has lost 2 pioneers in electronic arts recently - both Brits, Jim Marshall & John Crosfield.
The Marshall name is well known as he created the Marshall amplifier that has been so ubiquitous in rock/pop music.
Classic Marshall / Les Paul combination demo
John Crosfield worked in the printing business & came up with almost countless innovations, first for presses, assuring optimum ink flow & color registration and later, color separation & electronic imaging back before Adobe & Apple brought it to the cheaper desktop.
Pre Desktop imaging workstationFor a local connection - Crosfield created the first digital scanner and the first digital scanner installed in Cincinnati was a Crosfield at Vogt Color.
And, yeah, I have a Marshall amp & a Crosfield drum.

More on John Crosfield here
More on Jim Marshall here