Before Digital...

You don't see this very often.

I've recently been scouring my archives to illustrate a talk at a local camera club and discovered this interesting picture I snapped while on a trip to Northern India in 2004. From memory this guy was seen operating in Jaipur, in Rajastan. The large view camera is dual purpose - as a portrait taking device, as well as a processing lab. Ingenious, very budget, very clever.

Next time you get grumpy at not having the 'right' lens or the 'right' light for a shot you are chasing - consider how tricky working in a street setting like this must be. Here we can see my travel companion posing on an upturned bucket against a somewhat dark, scruffy backdrop while the photographer's assistant provides some respite from the sun with an umbrella.

The camera has seen better days. But it still worked! The process was: firstly the operator got the subject in focus on the ground glass screen (on the back of the camera, no AF here!). He then loaded a piece of photo paper into the film slide, took the portrait and, with his hands slipped into a dark cloth tube, took the exposed photo paper and processed it in a developer and separate fixer bath located INSIDE the camera.

When not being used, the developer was 'kept cool' in an ice bucket. Or at least that's what I think it was - it could have been a bottle of sugar cane juice for all I know. Once the paper was 'fixed', he removed the print and re-photographed the resulting negative image, in the hot and very bright sun to produce a positive image. A lot of effort for just a few rupees. But the amazing thing was that it was a system that worked. Snapped on a Nikon Coolpix 3100, a new camera at the time, loaned to me by Maxwell Optical, the then agents for all things Nikon.

Here's the photographer turned lab technician, fiddling about inside the camera with a developer and a fixer dish to process the paper. A truly mind boggling effort to make a buck on the street...