u/BookkeeperGlad9987

In the 1980s, if an advertising agency wanted a picture of a Jeep on a mountain in Moab, you put a Jeep on a mountain in Moab.

Then you shot it on 8x10 film. Then you sent your assistant overnight to the nearest lab — sometimes hundreds of miles away — to process the film. Then they drove back by 9am so you could keep shooting. Then you FedEx’d the processed sheets to Detroit so the agency could approve the image.

No email. No digital. No computers. No way to transmit a photograph except by putting it on a plane.

Automotive advertising photographer Jim Secreto, on what it actually took to make a single car ad on location. From the archive.