Picture Perfect!

Those were the days when photography meant lugging around huge cameras with plates. now, it’s simply a matter of click and share. V Ramasubban goes down memory lane to recall his passion for photography.

- V Ramasubban

The story of my learning photography and a few related processes like developing and printing can be traced to 1951 when I was 17-18 years old. It indeed is quite a long time ago. My father gave me a Zeiss Ikon camera – a famous German make, popular even today. The camera used glass plates coated with a special chemical instead of film rolls used later from the year 1952. The Zeiss Ikon camera with its six film plates was bulky and it was quite a task to carry it with you, especially if you were going for an outdoor shoot. The exposed plate was carried along with the six plates.

My camera had only six plates to be carried around, which implied that I could take only six photographs at a time. A few days after I got the camera, a friend whose family owned a studio told me that an accessory to the camera was available which would allow the use of roll film. What a boon it was! This enabled me the use one film roll with 16 exposures. He then asked me if I would like to learn the art of developing and printing the exposed film roll, which was the next steps in photography. He got the necessary chemicals from their family-owned shop and now all we needed was a dark room. At that time I was staying in the hostel of Loyola College.