The wonderful world of color

Color photographs in newspapers are common today. Each issue of the Times Pilot includes dozens of them. But when I started out in newspapers over 52 years ago, color news photos were rare. They were costly and labor intensive, and reproduction was awful on the old letterpresses that many newspapers used.

John B. Anderson, publisher of the Storm Lake newspapers when I started out as a cub reporter and photographer in 1972, decided we should run a color picture of Santa Claus in the Christmas edition. If memory serves me right, it was the first local color photograph printed in a Storm Lake newspaper.

But it took a lot of planning. First, we had to take the photo of Santa at Thanksgiving, because we had to send the film out for processing, which would take a week. Color photos for reproduction were generally shot using Kodachrome, a slide film rich in color but technically impossible to develop in a non-Kodak lab. So we shot the photo at Santa’s Castle and Dorothy Redenbaugh, who operated The Camera Shop in the Vista Theatre building, sent it out to be developed by Kodak.

When we got the film back about a week later, the next step was to have separations made by a photo engraver in Mason City, one of only a few places in Iowa that did this special work. The engraver took the 2x2 inch color slide and scanned it into an expensive machine that separated the picture into the four sheets of 8x10 inch film required for printing: cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow and black. It was an expensive process — probably a couple hundred dollars — and it took a couple weeks to get the separated films back that would be used to burn color images onto the printing plates.

We had a relatively new offset newspaper press then, so it was capable of high quality printing, but it was limited to just four pages in sections with a color photo. So that section had to be printed days ahead of time and inserted by hand into the rest of the paper. Because adjusting the color on the press was a tedious and time-consuming process, it took all day to run what normally would have been a one hour job.

We were able to speed up the process of color photos after I learned how to process color film in the newspaper’s dark room (which was set up for black and white), but it wasn’t easy. Developing black and white film was quick and easy, with fairly wide temperature latitude for the chemicals. Developing color was far more precise. The process took several hours and required the chemical developer temperatures — around 100 degrees F — to be maintained within a half degree throughout the process. Bruce Binning, the photographer for the Denison newspapers, showed me how to make our own color separations without sending them to an outside photo engraver. But it was still a time-consuming and expensive process that we only used on special occasions.

Newspaper technology has changed dramatically over the past six decades. We don’t use film in cameras any more. Now we shoot photos digitally which can be transferred in a matter of minutes instead of weeks onto newspaper presses.

Instead of running one photo just at Christmas or Easter, computer technology allows us to publish color on multiple pages of each edition of the Times Pilot. Since Nov. 15, 1991, we have published color photos in every edition of this newspaper, and I’m not sure if any other community newspaper in Iowa can make that claim.

We take pride in producing one of the best-looking newspapers in Iowa. We think that’s one of the reasons why our circulation continues to increase. Our readers appreciate quality. Thank you for reading. And look for lots more colorful pictures in the Times Pilot during this holiday season.