It just blows my mind how lucky I am that I had my first year of photography education in a still completely analog medium!

I happen to belong to a micro-generation, just a 6-year cohort called xennials. We were born 1977-1983 and grew up analog, but we were still young enough to fully learn digital. Looking at this year 2000 hand-made print of mine reminds me of how far we came from those analog times. We used to take a long breath to decide how to compose a single shot, and even leave the black edges to show that it was indeed what one captured on the spot.

Just recently I was part of a team on a large commercial shoot that involved some creative packshots as well. One product label was somewhat damaged, so the question came if the customer already had a 3D image of said product, or if we indeed needed to go on and build a white tent around a bottle, in order to properly photograph a very reflective chrome like logo. (Chrome surfaces tend to look black in a studio unless you see the reflection of something white or bright.)

It couldn’t have been funnier as one of us proclaimed: „Guys! This is a historic moment, we do this manually for the very last time, before CGI takes over! Lets do this!“ and we went on to hold a huge white fabric around the product to expose just the label to be comped in later.

And there you have it. Mere 20-something years down the road we are now experiencing the next adventure, that is computer generated imaging, CGI.

A difficult shape, a ribbed glas is still easier to picture in a studio playing around with lights, but a label, a shiny logo is almost an old-school craftsman´s passion to do in real life.

What a time to be alive.