The sun was peeking out from behind the legendary clouds as I passed through Seattle on my way to Sea-Tac Airport from Whidbey Island to fly home after two weeks in the beautiful Northwest doing my annual training for the Navy Reserves. In Reserve Speak it's called AT, but I usually refer to it as "my two weeks" when explaining my yearly absence to co-workers and family. I had a lot of time on my hands before the flight, so I went into the city to Seattle Central Community College. I spent two years at Seattle Central earning a commercial photography degree and decided to see what was new in the program and visit with my old instructor, Alejandro Tomas. He hasn't changed much in the nearly eight years it's been since I practically lived in these spaces as a student, but everything has certainly jumped ahead.
As Tomas showed me around the old haunts-beaming like a proud father over his remarkable program-I quickly noticed how familiar the place looked in spite of all the new hardware that reflected how much the industry has evolved in the last decade. Gone were the black-and-white processing rooms and color-enlargers we spent hours laboring on for the perfect print. Sleek new Apples with flat-screen monitors and big Epson printers now dole out the ever-improving work of the current crop of young photographers.
Stepping into the Seattle Central studios, with their creaky wooden floors, brought on a wave of nostalgia. I could remember shooting digital images via large, expensive scanning backs mounted on the 4x5 cameras that required us to be very still and not even walk across the floor while the camera took an excruciatingly long time to capture the product (it was too slow for portraiture work). We were using almost cutting-edge equipment at the time, and the digital revolution was still in its infancy. Today, the students (who looked so young!) shoot practically everything with digital cameras-like we do here at ATV Rider. Like any new technology, the early years had their hiccups, and there was a learning period for the entire industry as we found out that digital cameras look and operate like film cameras but don't necessarily capture images in the same manner. Color management, ISO, image editing and storage were among the issues to be resolved, and we're still learning new methods to deal with the multitude of digital idiosyncrasies. And then there's the hardware that changes yearly. It's enough to confuse the uninitiated and really points out that we photo producers can never stop improving. Otherwise, some rebel will usurp us in a flash.
The ATV world is undergoing a similar progression. New machines are more capable, powerful and comfortable, plus they offer more options than we ever envisioned with their predecessors. What used to be the top model can turn into a has-been in a surprisingly short period. And it's not just hardware that has improved, the talent pool in the racing world where this technology is pushed to the edge has deepened just in the last few years. New racers are popping up in the ever-growing off-road racing scene that has resurged to levels last seen in the late '80s. Sure, all this innovation comes with growing pains, as we have discovered pipe testing with EFI machines. But, like everything else, it might only be a few years before ATVs still breathing via cantankerous carburetors are facing extinction. Such is the dynamic world we live in-often filled with tech revolutions so subtle that we only see the change when we take a trip in the Way-Back Machine. For me, the step back to eight years ago let me compare that with today. It's been a quick journey, and I can't even imagine how advanced things will be in another eight years!-Bryan Nylander