Well......I have to differ with that. And I scrounged up this image of moi (taken by Alan Pogue) as proof that we were slamming around photons off the camera for at least a couple decades before. In fact, I'm going to bet that this photo, showing a Canon EF film camera actually dates from the very early 1980's. What we have in this picture is Kirk Tuck in his twenties, a Canon EF with a 50mm lens and a six foot coiled cord connecting the camera to a Braun flash. Sorry, I can't remember the model.
I was at the Sheraton hotel for the election night party with the then (obscure) Texas Republicans. They lost. Badly. Really badly. I am absolutely certain of one thing.......I was using hand rolled Kodak Tri-X film.
Off camera? We didn't even have a name for it. That's just the way we rolled back then. We could figure out manual guide numbers faster than kids can text on an iphone. And no screen on the back for a crutch. I'll say it. Photographers today are wimps when it comes to using flash. Just wimps. Turn that screen off and shoot some manual "off camera" flash. It's not nearly as hard as everyone makes it out to be...... Did I mentioned that we were also able to focus our own cameras simultaneously with our guide number calculations? Amazing.
