WHEN you load a camera with a roll of photographic film, you have only so many shots.
Imagine having only so many chances to capture photons of a scene before you on a wound ribbon of film, unlike with digital cameras where you could click the shutter almost indiscriminately.
A film camera worked by exposing the film to light.
The camera exposed the film to light by opening the shutter.
The film captured the photons – particles of light – and the camera held it in the dark until it could be developed.
For black and white photos, film had an emulsion layer that captured the light let in through the lens to form a latent image on silver halide crystals.
Colour film had more emulsion layers of silver halide dyed to sensitivity to capture cyan (aqua blue), yellow and magenta (purplish-red) colours on the spectrum of light.
The latent image needed to become a permanent image and this is what happens when the film is developed. The film is taken out of the camera and unrolled and put into a series of chemical baths to reveal the latent image on the film.
First the film is dunked into a developer that turns the exposed silver halide into silver metal which is opaque.
Then it is rinsed, and dunked into the fixer which washes the unexposed silver halide away, leaving you with the negatives of the pictures you had taken.
Negatives are the silver metal suspended in the gelatin of the emulsion layer of the film, and are inverted – what is black is white.
The negatives are then enlarged, using an enlarger which shines light through the negative and projects it onto photo paper.
The photo paper is then put into a developer, a stop bath, a fixer, and then rinsed in water, to give you the photograph.
Photographic film and photo paper are light sensitive material, so all this processing would happen in a darkroom.
As a photographer you could develop the film yourself, or take it to a photo laboratory for processing.
This is one of the services Caines Jannif provided back in its heyday.
Competition on the retail side – selling cameras and film – continued unabated for many years with vicious price cutting.
You would recall from previous editions that Caines Jannif shared the Kodak dealership through a jointly owned distribution company with Stinson Pearce.
It was Kodak who stepped in and decided that a joint company would better serve the market.
By the time Caines Jannif opened its first colour processing lab in 1979, Stinson Pearce had been operating theirs for years and had an edge over their competitor.
They would eventually buy the colour processing lab and the Kodak dealership outright in the early to mid 1980s, after a change in management at Stinson Pearce saw the company shift its focus to the lucrative jewelry trade.
Suva was a duty free shopping mecca and Stinson Pearce owned the Prouds franchise for Fiji and was taken over by Motibhai and Company Ltd.
A big part of their revenue at the time was earned from the sale of postcards.
Only a couple of decades ago, it was estimated that about 20 million postcards were sold every year the globe over.
As you would have read in the previous edition of our Point of Origin series on the life of Ikbal Jannif and Caines Jannif Ltd, he traveled all around the Pacific on photographic assignments to take pictures for postcards.
That was the easy part.
Back in Suva the film had to be developed and prints made.
Kelsey Jannif came to Fiji and married Mr Jannif in late 1970, it was only natural that she joined Caines Jannif.
Her mother was a photographer in New Zealand and she and her twin sister Stephanie Nicolson learned the trade from her.
She said Caines Jannif was collecting film for colouring processing but sent it to the Stinson Pearce lab.
“Back then we still did manual processing, the old style film developing with the chemicals,” she said.
“Everything was hand processed and we only did black and white.”
This was all done on the second floor of the Caines Jannif building.
“All the photos Ikbal took of the independence celebrations were processed and printed here.
“There would have been hundreds of photographers at Albert Park and they would all have been crammed in the photographers areas so there are a lot of photos from that day which look the same but the ones we have we can prove that we took them because we have the negatives and they all have the Caines Jannif stamps on the back.”
Back in those days photographs were made on paper which held the quality much better than what is used today.
This, combined with the way film captured light, as opposed to digital cameras, gave the photographs a different look – a life almost.
The different companies making film at the time each had their special ways of engineering their film and you would have to use their chemicals to process their film.
After the darkroom photographs were printed out on a machine.
“To take away the secrecy and open up the process more, Ikbal put glass around the printing room so people could see their pictures as they were printed, and cut.
“It was harder for us because we always had to be on our best behaviour because the public were peering in.”
When colour processing and printing started in 1979 the photo studio in Suva became Caines Photofast.
Branches opened up in Nadi, Lautoka, Labasa, Ba, and Sigatoka.
In 1986 the company went into scanning which took Caines Jannif into 24-hour operations.
“Scanning gave us more control over quality and colour correction.
“We used to do a lot of postcards, and getting them done overseas was a nightmare.
“It would take three months just to get the samples across, they would send them back and if we had to make corrections then we would send them back over, it took forever.”
It allowed them to do all their own colour correcting and to do it for clients as well.
“We started to do colour pages for the newspaper, we supplied The Fiji Times with all the film for the pages they wanted to do in colour.”
When the pages of the newspaper, or any publication, are laid out it needs to be transferred to the printing press.
A long time ago this was done by moveable typeset, and then they created plates that would fit on the press and roll, leaving the printed material on the paper.
Before it could be done straight from the computer to plate maker, the pages would have to be produced on film which was then used to make the plates that were fitted to the press.
The ink comes on and the press rolls out the pages.
This became big business for Caines Jannif and eventually their building in the heart of Suva became too small to handle the operations.
“We were running three shifts, 24 hours a day, to keep up with the demand.
“Then we moved to the factory in Raiwai.”
The factory housed all the scanning operations and was the heart of the company’s operation until printers could directly transfer the pages from computers to the plates without film.
The story continues next week.
