In my old age I am well aware of the fickleness of consumer product marketing, so I hesitate to make too many H.G. Wells "what if" predictions about anything, let alone the possible direction photography without the digi invasion. But one's reality is always subjective, predicting is fun, and as we know, hindsight is always 20:20.
Yes, we would have Kodachrome. Also Ektachrome. Not, gods forbid, horrible Anscochrome nor Agfachrome. CT slide films had beautiful muted colors and mid tones, but all faded in a few years. Agfa knew this in 1970, but as one of their retired executives told me, did nothing about it. Just kept selling the stuff to us suckers. So I now have a filing cabinet full of faded images of Bali from 1969, when the island was truly pristine, before the jet age grope tour madness fatally damaged the Balinese culture. Those images are a great loss to me.
Also Panatomic-X, Plus-X, the original Ektar 25, the Agfa B&W range, the original Adoxes.
By the '90s most film cameras were as good as they got. My partner's cheap-feel plastic Nikon F65 with D Nikkors produces as good negatives as I can with my Rolleis and Fujis.My 2002 Contax G2 easily outshoots anything else I've ever owned and used.
Digital imagery in one form or another would exist. Reality however intrusive to some cannot be disregarded, and if year 2000 consumers had not embraced the fledgling digital technology en masse, I think it highly likely we would now have mass marketed (affordable?) digital backs for 35mm SLRs, also adaptor units to print digital images in optical enlargers. As China ever shows us, if there is a market, there will soon be a product.
Film processing had to change, and would have. Most '90s pro labs were big, costly to operate, and knew they could charge like wounded bulls and the suckers would still line up at the counter. There were few alternatives. The quality from local one hour shopfront labs staffed by surly 18 year olds unable/unwilling to clean fingerprints off an auto printer lens, was so bad that we avoided them like leprosy. It had to change, and it. In a mass exodus to digital.
Film era chemistry also had to evolve, and did, to products less environmentally damaging. Would coffee developer technology be big today Would we be recycling our coffee grounds to an Ilford depot for reformulating as Caffeine-X?
Would I have to pay A$10 for a roll of 120 fuji Acros and A$25 for 35mm Kodak Portra? And would any processor dare to advertise they returned images OL and then trashed the negatives? No, I think not.
Another viewpoint. Without digital and related technology, would we have had PCs, laptops, palmtops and the internet such as we do? Would we be posting all this today and discussing as we are? Probably, in one form or another. Blogging by telex wouldn't be much fun, though.
Fortunately or unfortunately, as the individual case or viewpoint may be, digital photography is here to stay. Film is now largely niche. Who can afford a 16x20" plate nowadays, never mind the camera? Does anyone enjoy the stink of fixer?
Like some posters, without the advent of digital I too would likely have given up photography. My Nikon D90 in 2008 freed me after forty years from the tyranny of the darkroom. A digital photography-free life would have driven me to other pastimes, like HC-B to his watercolors. Or hand-embroidering Velveeta landscapes.
For all this, many keen and intelligent photographers are still using film. Many others are returning to film and a few others are coming to film for the first time. We have almost as many options today as we did in the 1960s. There is hope.
Cell phones are here to stay, like them or not. Mobiles were in secret use by military and espionage types by 1980. I have this from the best authority. Dick Tracy and his snazzy wrist Rolex, or was it a wrist Bulova...
Ditto selfies, and why not? My grandparents took them. I have all mine on film back to the '60s. My nieces, nephews and my friends' and neighbors' kids still take them, but digitally and with cell phones. Not film. Times change, some things stay. Go figure.
Enjoyed all this greatly.
