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It's astounding how difficult photography must have been back then. Today if you're trying to learn with a digital SLR you can take pictures and change apertur

It's astounding how difficult photography must have been back then. Today if you're trying to learn with a digital SLR you can take pictures and change aperture/focus/exposure and see the result and gain an understanding of how changing them impacts the picture. Back then you had to take an entire roll of pictures and it'd be a long time until you could see if you were "off". Equivalent is like the old days of punch-card programming. You'd better hope you didn't have any bugs because you wouldn't find out until much later when your job ran.

wrs 5y ago
It wasn’t really that bad. It didn’t take much practice to get reasonably good results. Built-in camera metering worked well, and you got a feel for aperture vs. depth of field (sometimes that’s even marked on the lens). If you were trying for a special effect you might have to do an experimental roll, but ordinary circumstances typically “just worked”. Punch cards, on the other hand, really were that bad. :)