Color or BW? – The change began in 1987 with “Budd” Dwyer

Like most news photographers with a lengthy career, the majority of my published work before the early 1990s is in black and white.

Good old Tri-X in a 35mm film camera. Pushed to 3200. Processed in D-76, HC-110, Microdol-X, Acufine, Diafine, or, in an emergency, warm Dektol.

It was rare to use any other film. No need for a slower speed. It was newspaper work and high shutter speeds and wide depth-of-field were the stronger requirements. Only on special assignments such as fashion shoots or studio portrait sessions did we have the choice of another film, usually Plus-X.

The heavy use of BW film ended on January 22, 1987, when Pennsylvania State Treasure Robert “Budd” Dwyer committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a revolver during a press conference.

Associated Press photographer Paul Vathis covered what he thought would be a routine news conference as Dwyer was scheduled to be sentenced the following day on his conviction for bribery. Although AP photographers carried color negative film in their bags, the instructions were to use it only for the most important assignments when it might be expected that an AP member newspaper could be expected to publish the photo on a section front page. Only very large newspapers, those with large advertising revenue, published color every day and in every section.

Paul’s choice of BW coverage was well justified.

The news conference was routine in most aspects. A convicted state official making his final appearance before camera before going to jail. I never got to directly as Paul about the day but I am told he expected Dwyer to continue to profess his innocence, perhaps express anger at his prosecution, and maybe show an emotional response worthy of a two-column mug shot. It certainly wasn’t worth shooting color.

Until Dwyer put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Paul, with routine wire service speed, processed his Tri-X film. His photos of Dwyer were immediately moved to the front of the national and international transmission queues with the first photo landing on the desks of photo editors within an hour after the shooting. Newspapers in Europe were moving toward early deadlines. Asia was just beginning a new publication cycle.

A courier was sent for his film so it could be taken to the AP’s New York headquarters where high resolution scans could be made for delivery to magazines and other clients who needed better quality than wire service transmissions.

The New York photo editor requesting the film pickup discovered during the conversation with Paul that he’d shot BW, not color.

Our internal discussion at the time centered on the value of overseas resales of the BW photo versus the value if it had been in color. Domestic color use wasn’t expected to have been greater than BW at most newspapers. It was only five years since Gannett began publishing the colorful USA Today and few newspapers, even the papers owned by Gannett, published color every day. It was even more likely many would have opted for what readers would have objected to as gruesome, a man with a gun in his mouth or his head flying back as the gun fired.

What had begun as a simple exercise in covering a routine new conference, in BW, changed The AP’s rules for shooting BW.

Don’t.

It became rare, almost nonexistent, to see an AP staffer and most freelancers, shooting BW on an AP assignment. My film and chemistry budget increased substantially. The work flow changed. I now carried a portable color darkroom instead of BW.

Color printing was done on a Kodak Ektaflex processor. Our print transmitters at the time sent three analog transmissions of cyan, magenta, and yellow, from each print. The AP’s photo transmission network became more crowded as a color photo took 30 minutes to send instead of the 10 minutes of a single BW image.

The logical next step was to cut down the transmission time. The AP’s leased AT&T telephone lines were stretched to their capacity. LaserPhoto II, introduced in 1984, had increased quality instead of decreasing transmission time. Receivers in newspapers couldn’t receive photos faster than 10 minutes per photo.

AP purchased a satellite transponder in 1984 and had begun delivering news to its membership. The plan was to do away with all leased lines and use the satellite to deliver all news material, including photos. The time for a color transmission would go from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.

The backlogs were at the sending and receiving ends. Photo transmitters still required 10 minutes per scan. The scans were transmitted over telephone lease lines, even in AP offices. Member newspapers provided transmitters by The AP also used leased lines.

Photos were received on a LaserPhoto receiver. The receiver, like a very sophisticated, high resolution fax machine, turned analog signals into a laser light beam sent through a crystal whose density was modulated by the signal’s amplitude. Even the early satellite 30 second transmissions had be converted to analog signals to be printed.

The introduction of PhotoStream, the high speed satellite delivery system, later in 1987 didn’t speed up the process because most member newspaper lacked equipment to handle the first digital photo files.

It wasn’t until 1988 when Leaf built the Leafax 35, the first self-contained portable color film scanner. Photographers now worked without a print darkroom and delivered images electronically. The nearest one-hour processor could handle their film.

Inside the Leafax was a Nikon Coolscan. Many newspapers bought the scanner from local retailers and connected them to Macs using early versions of Photoshop for picture editing. The resulting compressed picture files were then sent on regular telephone lines to the newspaper’s photo editor’s desktop for movement into it pagination system.

Deliveries of the first Leaf Picture Desks in 1990 began the surge to all-digital delivery. The first functional digital news camera, the NC2000, introduced in 1994, marked the end of film’s fortunes for newspaper and wire service photographers.

The NC2000 was built on the body of a Nikon film camera, the N90. An early version of a Nikon BW still/video camera used by Pulitzer Prize winning AP staffer Ron Edmonds sent the first AP digital image of President Bush’s inauguration in 1989.

Nikon delivered its first true professional color digital camera in 1999. The Nikon D1 sensor captured a 2.7 megapixel image at 4.5 frames a second making it the camera of choice for news photographers. Priced at more than $5,000 in 1999 dollars they were sold as fast as Nikon could make them.

The digital camera market quickly progressed to today’s market where high-end cameras still sell for about $5,000 and low end cameras with 10 times the capacity of the NC2000 and sell for less than the price of a replacement battery for the Nikon D1.

Even the price and size of the storage cards has drastically changed. My first card for an NC2000 was a 128 megapixel, PCMCIA-sized 2.5-inch hard drive that cost almost $300. I still have it.

The rush to color in newspapers had many influences, some financial, some editorial. USA Today publishing color every day and on every section front. Reducing costs of photo production and delivery. Staying competitive with television. (This was long before the Internet came into play.) Picture resale profits. Earlier delivery of significant images from news and sporting events. Faster turnaround to the presses.

But, they all began when “Budd” Dwyer stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, in BW.