I first began shooting professionally in 1980 as a photographer/reporter for a small weekly in Kansas City, Missouri. Covering the local angle of the U.S. presidential campaigns, I got to shoot a rally for Jesse Jackson, juxtaposing a shot of him making a fiery speech against a pic of a Jewish guy in the front row holding up a sign that said “Hymies for Reagan.” It was one of my first published photos and I was quite thrilled. I was 18 years old.
Back in the day, we shot film. And you Got what you Got. If you blew your exposure or focus, you didn’t Get. I learned a lot of painful lessons back then, but it forced me to get better at my job. Now in previous decades, retouching negatives had always been a thing in the commercial world, but you didn’t dare mess with that in the news world. If you manipulated anything on your transparency using the Dark Arts…
