I hate digital cameras. I love digital cameras.

I hate to admit it, but I go back to the Matthew Brady days when we used to hang a plywood 4-by-8 over the bathroom window to block the light so we could develop our Tri-X black-and-white film. I carried the same piece of crappy plywood from the apartment in North Attleboro (below the motorcycle gang) to Gloucester to Camden. There was plenty of room in the borrowed pickup truck because I owned precious little furniture.

It seems like Civil War times, now. It was like witchcraft, served up with a little alchemy.

You would put the plywood over the bathroom window to block the light while you developed your Tri-X in that little aluminum container. You had a very special timer to leave the film in for just the right minute and second combination.

Then you dumped that out and poured in the “fixer,” I think. It all seems so long ago, now. Then you would dip it in Photo Flo to preserve the “archival” quality of the negatives, because they were so very important, you know. You would hang the negatives on a string then wipe them off with a sponge so special that you would keep it in its own special bag.

We were all environmentalists, but we polluted every town we lived in with our deadly mixture of developer, fixer and the rest. We were artists, after all, and our work was vital. We kept our black-and-white negatives (color was for peasants) in our garages and cellars, like they would be important some day, like Picasso rejects.

We were all so serious.

Then you would take another piece of plywood and place that over your bathtub and place your vital enlarger on top with the developer, fixer and wash solution in separate but equal trays. God knows how many years of life we have sacrificed to those toxic nights (days were too bright) spent in those makeshift darkrooms. Probably decades.

When I mixed those highly toxic chemicals, my hands peeled for days. That could not be a good thing.

But it was all worth it, I remember, for that single magic moment when an image appeared in the developer tray and kept coming, coming for your perfect work of art. You would “burn and dodge” that image, blocking and increasing that light until it made that perfect print.

We struggled with the Ansel Adams “zone system” until we could discuss it at cocktail parties ad nauseum, if not employ it in the darkroom. We talked about f-stops and shutter speeds and depth of field, whatever that was.

Hey, I was an artiste. I had a Newbury Street photo salon in Boston for several years, until I decided it was time to eat again.

At the Rockland office of the Bangor Daily News, we used to ship our vital pictures on the Greyhound bus at 3 p.m., every day. If it happened at 3:15 p.m. or later, no pictures got in the paper unless someone wanted to drive 120 miles with the negs, a four-hour trip.

Now, it is like a different century (well yeah!). You take a tinkertoy camera, aim it at a subject, forget the f-stop, shutter speed or depth of field. Take a few shots and go back to the paper. Download the film in 10 seconds. Decide which pictures you want. Don’t even bother to print them out. Just ship them to the editor. Done. No four-hour trips. If you want a print, that will take another two seconds.

You know what? The pictures are just as good as we took 10, 20 and 30 years ago. You can’t tell the difference.

But it is nowhere as much fun, without all that crappy plywood.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.