The most richly satisfying and rewarding experience I'll ever have in this life..

[Guest]

I knew a fellow I used to do photography trips with, who had a string of contracting jobs because hr knew how to code in Fortran4 and or Cobol. In the mid-late 90's, many "institutional" data centers were still using mainframes than ran those languages, and the young people coming out of computer science programs at that time had no idea how to code with those. So, even as an "old man", he had all the work he could handle.

Those old FORTRAN and COBOL guys are still in high demand and fetch top dollar. Sadly, that was a wee bit before my time. We were dirt poor and lived in the sticks when I was growing up, and my dad wore that "working class hero" bullshit like a badge of honor. He had a complete disdain for computers, although he knew little about them. Consequently, I never got my hands on a computer until senior year of high school. Sometimes I think he was right though. I don't see much evidence to support claims that computers have made society better, or led to an overall improvement in the material well-being of the nation.

I agree about the current film craze. However, I wouldn't mind teaching black and white darkroom workshops where I could separate some funds from the clutches of the Gen Z'ers who think going back to film is a super hot idea. There are not many around like me that did photography actively during the film to digital bridge years. They have no idea the subtleties of doing it, other than what "the box" says to do. I spent many years in a darkroom developing my own formulas. If they want some of these secrets, it's time to pay up :)

I met a woman on another board who was still doing plate photography. Like the old 19th century cameras where the photographer ducks under a black sheet to take the picture. In my opinion, the early Daguerreotypes were far superior to the cheesy holographic images we have today. I saw a documentary where they found a lot of 19th century stereoscopic photos -- the ones made with two cameras set at an interpupillary distance -- and digitally manipulated them to make some really cool dioramas, with foreground objects like cardboard cutouts and background objects reconstructed so that you could see things that were obscured by foreground objects in the original photos.