The news has probably already got around town but for those still unaware, I’m about to end a 37-year career in journalism, all of them with the Fountain Hills Times/Times Independent.
It can be hard to know when it is time to retire. We live in a fast-moving world, and a lot has changed since I started this job. I was hired primarily because I knew my way around a photo darkroom, and it was a need at The Times in the summer of 1988. I knew every step from how film was exposed in the camera – setting the shutter speed and aperture to get the right exposure – taking the film out of the camera and converting it to negatives, making the prints in a darkroom to operating a “stat” machine to create the half-tone print for converting the print to the page.
Today, except for setting the exposure for the camera, and even that is largely automatic, the photo process is all digital using computers.
