From celluloid to cell phones
Photography and film… art forms of the 20th century, now the lingua franca of the 21st
The modern history of still and moving photography is inextricable from the story of the Mac, germinated by the 1979 visit of Steve Jobs and software engineer Bill Atkinson to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Five years earlier, PARC’s Alvy Ray Smith had co–created SuperPaint, a program that edited frames rasterized from analog videotape. Smith would go on to co–found the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which, in 1986, with money put in by Steve Jobs on leaving Apple, became Pixar.
Rewind to 1978, the year after the release of Star Wars, with special effects by director George Lucas’ company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). In Ann Arbor, a city in Michigan, teenagers Thomas and John Knoll were picking up on their father’s interest in tech. While Thomas poured chemicals to balance tone and color in his darkroom, John dabbled with BASIC programming on a borrowed 64K Apple II Plus. By 1984, John’s own Apple II Plus was running a home–made motion– control camera rig adapted from a computer numerical control (CNC) milling machine. Thomas bought one of the first Macs, which came with MacPaint, Bill Atkinson’s image editing program. He went on to use a Mac Plus for his PhD in digital image processing.
John’s experiments got him a job at ILM. On a visit home in 1987, he saw similarities between Thomas’s research and his colleagues’ Pixar Image Computer. When the powerful Macintosh II arrived, the brothers wrote a program that offered similar functions with a visual interface instead of UNIX commands. They kept adding features, and Photoshop 1.0 was released for the Mac by licensee Adobe in February 1990. Image editing was about to go mainstream.
Making memories
Getting images remained a challenge. Although TV had used video cameras since the 1950s, the pictures were too fuzzy for stills. But CCD image sensor chips — a US invention refined at Sony under Kazuo Iwama, who’d worked
on the first transistor–based radio and TV sets — held the seed of a digital revolution. In 1991, Israeli firm Leaf launched a CCD back for medium–format stills cameras, replacing the film holder with a 2048x2048–pixel CCD that captured stills to a connected Mac.
That requirement, on top of a five–figure price tag, limited the Leaf’s market but, three years later, Apple released the Kodak– built QuickTake 100, a camera with memory for eight 640x480–pixel stills. Over the next decade, nearly all photography abandoned film. Instead of scanning negatives, users were able to import digital photos directly.
Solid–state storage wasn’t yet big or fast enough for video. Tape was the norm when non–linear editing (NLE) was brought to the Mac by Avid in 1988, then in 1991 to lower budgets by Adobe with Randy Ubillos’s Premiere. It was still the norm in January 1999, when Apple released Final Cut Pro, also created by Ubillos.
Moving pictures
Quickly adopted by video editors — it won an Emmy for its contribution to TV — Final Cut Pro was also used for movies, but they were still shot on film and edited by machines that cut celluloid to match digital proxies.
In 2000–2001, Lucas made Star Wars: Attack of the Clones using Sony’s CineAlta HDW–F900, a 1080p HDCAM camera that could save to tape, disc, or flash memory cards. The next decade saw video cameras migrate to card storage and film switch to digital.
Despite industry skepticism, 2011’s Final Cut Pro X, with its ‘magnetic timeline’ user interface, brought both the price and simplicity of professional NLE down to consumer level. Rivals followed: Premiere Pro with Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription, and Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve with a free personal version. But Apple had initiated an even bigger paradigm shift with the iPhone, which, with Android on its tail, brought still and (from 2009) video recording to a pocket device with onboard preview, storage and playback.
Whole feature films, from Sean Baker’s Tangerine to Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, have been shot on iPhones and released in theatres worldwide. But it’s even more significant that phone cameras have made image–makers of us all. Photoshop became a verb for aspirational pictures of people and products created by the media; now Instagram is a verb for doing it yourself. If the 2000s pointed a camera at everything, the 2010s took it further by placing the user both behind and in front of it.