Those Good Old Days
"Let me tell you a few stories from the pre-historic era," Enam Bhai clears his throat sitting in his glass walled cubicle with the fellow photographers working for The Daily Star.
The storyteller here is Sk Enamul Haq, popularly known as Enam Bhai, our chief photographer who has been with The Daily Star from the very beginning.
"Pre-historic?" I laugh.
"They took place in a time when there was no eight storied Daily Star Centre in Farmgate. When there was no need for a well-equipped graphics section and no wide range of digital cameras," he continues in a dramatic voice.
"There was, however, one clunky desktop computer, a few 35 mm film cameras, and some large pasting boards to work on the newspaper layout. And there were pitch-black darkrooms, and this is a story about how we got freed from these matchbox sized darkrooms when digital cameras came into our lives," he continues.
Back then, the journey of clicking the right picture to delivering it to the newsroom was quite a long one.
"We started off as a black and white newspaper when we had a team of four photographers- AKM Mohsin, SK Enamul Haque, Shafiuddin Ahmed Ditu and Hiru. After capturing the pictures, we would spend hours in the darkroom, standing in sweat and congestion, in suspense and joy to develop the films into negatives. And then we would put the negatives onto the photosensitive papers that make the final print. After the final washing, once they were dry, we would put a caption on the back of it and turn them in. Such a long process!" Enam Bhai remembers his eyes closed.
"We were the luckiest to have the first air-condition set up in our darkroom in the history of The Daily Star," he adds laughingly.
While these days we take many photographs to get that one perfect shot, back in the days of film photography, there was barely any space for a second chance.
"A typical roll of film would cost 10 taka and used to have only 36 exposures, and on top of that we had to spend those very carefully. Using just your one perfect sense, we were required to capture that one moment with one click," he continues. "In 1991, when Lieutenant General (Retd.) Hussain Muhammad Ershad was given a prison sentence; I was there to take his photograph crowded with many other photographers. My challenge was to take a photo of him in one shot, which I did and later shared with other photographers."
"We had run into hard times a couple of times," Enam Bhai recalls. "Unmindful for a moment, you might end up having an over exposed photograph and uncommon thing to happen."
"You couldn't back up film; if something happened to your rolls between shooting and developing, all your work goes in vain. It happened once to our fellow photographer who went to Mymensingh to photograph the devastating flood and when he came back he discovered that nothing had been captured in his film."
I gasp in wonder, not daring to ask what happened after that.
There was a growing market demand for coloured photos, when the Daily Star's closest competitor started printing on coloured newsprints. "After moving into our Dhanmondi office in 1993, every Thursday, we started publishing colour photographs on the front and back pages. In 2004, finally we got our first and only digital camera that caused a stir among the photographers," says Enam Bhai. "However we used to have only one digital camera which all of us made sure to share together. Eventually that number increased."
In last 25 years, Enam Bhai agrees that as an organisation we have undergone extraordinary changes, and that this is particularly true for the layout artists.
"Now we do the page layout of the newspaper with keyboard commands on computer, but even a few years back, it was a different story," adds Joy Bhai, otherwise known as Mohammad Asimujjaman, our Deputy section in charge, Production.
"Before the page layout skills had expanded to electronic media, we used to rely on a pair of steady hands using cutting and pasting tools and of course a good eye," laughs Joy Bhai.
"We used to utilise layout boards, where we would manually cut and paste the news printouts following the right alignment. When they would be proofread, the designers would have to again manually cut out sections and replace them with the corrected types," Joy Bhai says.
He further explains the manual layout wizardry, which requires another thousand words for me far exceeding the allotted word count.
I came back to my desk, head spinning, thinking of all the ups and downs that we have gone through in the last two decades. I look at the individual computers sitting on our desks, at the fancy professional cameras, the tiny memory cards, the giant computers where all our advanced graphics are being done.
Seeing them, Enam Bhai's tales surely sounded like something that happened during once-upon-a-time-when-there-was-no-electricity-and-dinosaur-exited era.
Prehistoric, yeah sure!
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