Just as we, a small group of News Photographers in Hyderabad had just covered a political protest against reservations near the Secretariat and were relaxing – leaning behind the grill of the British Library on a July pre-noon in 1987, our staff attender at Indian Express on his cycle screeched to a halt yelling at me to rush to office on Lower Tank Bund.
I lost no time hitching on to his bike as we cycled to the office. I then bundled myself into a taxi with two reporters to rush to Mancherial in Adilabad where the Dakshin Express had derailed. Early reports had said that there was a breach in the tank that led to the washing away of two train coaches full of passengers.
The long journey in incessant rain and on bad roads seemed unending. The daylight had begun to disappear fast.
News trickled that over 70 passengers were feared dead and more than five other bogies were perched precariously over the railway line.
By the time I started capturing the horror, night had descended completely. I needed to place a proper picture in my cassettes of 35-mm film that had to be sent to Hyderabad where they had to be processed and put in the edition before it was sent for printing.
Similar were the travails of photo or news dissemination – of other newspapers. Except for Doordarshan, TV channels had not appeared on the skyline of India.
But the-145 years plus old, The Hindu newspaper was possibly the first Indian publication to grab analog transmission of photographs by the late 1980s from across the globe to its servers at Chennai and scored over the others. At an STD booth in Amalapuram where I connected the transmitter to relay pictures of a rogue fire from a blown-out ONGC well, locals in hundreds swarmed to watch in awe for about 14 days.
Contrast these situations 45 years later. Your Android or iPhone does it all in a flash – be it video or photo for social Media handles or visuals playing out to breaking news on TV.
Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce in 1822 never imagined that his invention developed by 1826 of taking the first photograph would one day hold layers of history for generations to come as a ‘picture that speaks a thousand words’ was born.
However, it was not until August 19, 1939, that the French government purchased a patent for a photo (light) + graphy (paint) process by Louis Daguerre developed on Niépce’s invention and offered it free to the world via a patent of a pinhole camera and marked globally as ‘World Photography Day.’
Iconic photographers like Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier, Bresson, Steve McCurry , Nick Ut of Associated Press, (who covered the deadly napalm bombing by the US in Vietnam), Yusuf Karsh, Sebastio Salgado, Margaret Bourke, White, Raghu Rai, Kishore Parekh left their telling images in the history of Photographic journey. The Internet on the other hand opened the floodgates of Digital Photography to a new generation of photographers, hobbyists, and serious amateurs and professionals who had no idea of the chemistry behind the art.
The invention of cathode ray tube TV where each space in rows and columns presented a colour picture grid, led to the development of small rectangular rows leading to a revolution of ‘pixels’ by 1965.
As the tech was refined, the era of Computer Memory Flash Cards dawned, where image memory could be stored within the camera.
This led to SF Cards with high capacity data transfer speeds in digital cameras – offering Giga & Terra byte spaces for images to be stored in various resolutions.
As the 1990s arrived the era of film, photochemistry, bromide papers and the dank dark rooms of photographic processing gave way to floppy discs, SF Cards, and transfer of images from remote centres, airbrushing, and speedier transmission almost wiped out film photography.
“Imagine the thrill of seeing the pixelated image instantly over the preview monitor,” ‘It was unheard or imaginable during our film photography days,’ says RVK Rao, former Chief Photographer at TNIE as the digital camera revolution took over as a tsunami facilitating working photographers tools like crop option, Photoshop images, shoot in ambient light conditions and select the right frames from a staccato of high-resolution images in a jiffy.
The hurtling waves of image technology brought the option of video into the camera, just as cell phones adapted the change. World-class lens makers Zeiss & Hasselblad seamlessly integrated their wares into the handheld instruments as film product makers ORWO, Kodak, Konica or Ilford vanished into thin air.
By 2010 everyone and everybody was enjoying the fruits of digital technology that was driving cell phone photography through the dawn of selfies, pouts, and GIF add-ons.
Anybody and everybody was riding on the image super highway wanting for more.
A bird’s eye view was once a select option for a few photographers in the 1980s and 1990s or those who could hire a helicopter. In Hyderabad, the City Police gave a heli hop for select news lensmen to capture an overview of the yearly Ganesh procession, but no more as drone photography came thick and fast.
“Who would not like to see an overhead view of a public meeting, or marriage celebration, beamed direct to an LED monitor placed at the venue or live stream to friends and relatives abroad, via a direct and secure Wi-Fi connection,” says Naveen Kumar, a freelance event photographer.
Sports particularly cricket and the revolution of Channel 9 cameras placed by Kerry Packer at stadia or legendary Cricket Photographer Patrick Eager using a remote cable to monitor 5 still cameras at Oval is now part of photographic history, as capturing every flick, stumps flying in the air or a sixer being caught by a fan in the stands is captured by sensor-driven spider cams hanging over the stadia.
As movie and short filmmakers, news photographers moved into 2023 -2024, point tracking cameras placed at fashion shows, capturing the texture of gourmet, a split-second nuance it’s dawn of Artificial Intelligence advancements in photography aided by rapid algorithm and technology, the rise of Mirrorless Cameras aided by High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Virtual Reality of 360 degrees photography.
New age photographers are effortlessly rolling or overlocking the camera via a cell phone command or the gadget moving on a point on a slider, jib, or dolly–it’s a gizmo burst of offerings.
This game-changing era of photography is here for more. As cometh this Monday, photographers celebrate the tech strides threatening to wallop the visualization component — the USP of every lensman, behind the camera
P V Sivakumar is a well-known photojournalist who has earlier worked with the Indian Express, The Hindu, and Business Line.
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