Digital Matters

BY NEAL RANTOUL

We're welcoming Neal Rantoul as our digital columnist. A professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Northeastern University in Boston and head of the Photography Program since 1981, Neal will share some of his experiences and answer questions related to digital photography and digital photography education programs.

First, a little history: the Photography Program at Northeastern University was relatively stable through the late 80s and early 90s. I had worked to update color processing, replace older enlargers, increase the budget allocation, secure lab staffing, and increase lab access, etc. By 1992 computers were beginning to have a presence in the Graphic Design program, and I made a proposal to my dean to attend a workshop at the Center for Imaging in Camden, Maine. This facility had just been built by Kodak and was teaching computer-based workshops and permitting access to various kinds of new equipment.

When I got there, I was hopelessly lost. I didn't really even know how a Mac mouse worked and spent most of my time trying to convince others who were more knowledgeable to open files for me, show me how something worked, and tell me what that big thing was over in the special "cool room." It turned out to be an 8" x 10" film recorder. With help I drum scanned one of my 8" x 10" black-and-white negatives, removed a couple of trash cans from an alleyway in the scene, recorded my file back onto 8" x 10" film, and brought the original and new negative back home to print in my own darkroom. I then made two 16" x 20" RC prints from the negatives and went back to the dean.

I put the two prints in front of him. They were virtually identical, except for the copy-brushed removal of the trashcans. Once he saw what I'd done, now so common, it blew him away. That started 8 years of meetings, tying my requests for computers, scanners, and printers-as well as new courses-in with other disciplines; and countless meetings and presentations to college councils and curriculum committees, as a group of us proposed and put in place a new major called Multimedia Studies. This provided new labs, new courses, new teachers, and a new line in the budget.

During this time I needed to go from "clueless" to "digital guru" of still digital imaging really quick. From 1992-97 I took every workshop, applied for every grant, went to every trade show, and attended every product demo I could find. While all that was good, it wasn't until I started becoming interested in making my own work with computers that real doors began to open inside my own head.

For a large format black-and-white printer like me, digital had such strong potential for being truly great. It would allow me to make better large prints on a variety of papers and have more control over their quality. In 1997 I took 12-8" x 10" negatives to a local lab and had them make 40" x 48" prints on a Lambda printer, the first such printer in the Boston area. The next year I took about the same number of image scans, which I made on a newly donated Scitex scanner, to be printed as murals. Clearly I was becoming a convert. I had begun to teach a still digital imaging class in the Program, and we were all having a blast learning scanning, file management, Photoshop, film recording, and printing. We didn't know anything about color management in those days, and the new line of pigment inkjet printers hadn't been released yet.

Northeastern University's administration was mostly clueless about what we were doing, but the students sure weren't. Thanks to the new Multimedia major we had some steady state funding. This allowed us to buy a few cameras and an occasional printer or scanner. I was learning the new technology as I taught it, making no pretensions about being an authority in class, but working with students to solve problems or overcome technical hurdles. They'd want to do something and we'd work out a way to make it happen. Sometimes that meant bringing someone in or sending the students to someone who knew. It worked, but it sure was a "fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants" process.

In 2001 I took a sabbatical leave, bought the first of the pigment printers (the Epson 7500), took it home, and made mostly bad prints for a year. The metamerism was terrible: I couldn't get a straight black-and-white print to save my life, so I immersed myself in color management for the first time. However, I learned a great deal. I then wrote a proposal, got a little funding, hired a professional color management person, and cotaught a color management class with him, learning from him as I was teaching.

At that time the Program didn't have its own digital imaging lab. We were sharing Macs and PCs in Graphic Design's labs, but they weren't geared for our storage needs or quality of prints. I spent the year I returned from sabbatical beating on administrators and deans to fund a new computer lab, one that would be specific to our needs and our curriculum. Ninety thousand dollars and a few weeks of renovation later, some conventional darkroom space gave way to a new computer lab. We bought an Epson 9600, four Epson 2200s, several Epson 4800 scanners, and a bunch of eMacs.

So how do you get your administration to hear and support your needs? I don't have a standard solution or quick answer to that, but, as a general start, make your needs known to them by making your requests inclusive; in a competitive place such as a university with limited resources it is often best to join other professors in similar fields and include their requests with yours. Also try to involve administrators in what you are doing and want to do. For example, perhaps there's a dean or associate dean who likes photography. You could invite him or her to your program for a day, which might include sitting in on a class. I had very little positive response to my proposals unless I could prove that my plan's economic viability would increase enrollment or make the university more marketable. Northeastern's a big place competing with many other major institutions, locally and nationally.

I don't want you to think our battle is over and won; it isn't. We still have large needs ahead. We have no dedicated studio space at a time when students are making more studio-based photographs. Our computer lab is too small at a time when we need to increase our computer dependent classes. And our photography budget hasn't increased in more than ten years, while the expense of conventional and digital materials has increased. In fact, we received no budget increase when the new computer lab was installed.

Although this edition of Teachingphoto.com's digital column covers how Northeastern University came to have a digital lab, we are interested in presenting different schools' approaches to digital photography. In future columns we'll take a look at what strategies might work in this time of revolutionary change. We'll also examine how a computer lab needs to be configured, what might happen to the conventional side of photography in the next few years (unfortunately, it's common now to starve analog photography's lab needs to pay for expensive computers, software upgrades, and digital cameras), how we're all handling the storage of our files, and anything else that seems relevant in the rapidly changing environment we are all in.