To make his recollections of where he had been even more endearing, Hubbard took the time to hand tint nearly all his photographs. He would say swabbing and glazing the Marshall oil colors onto his black and white enlargements gave him one more opportunity to re-live his experiences in these out of the way places.
“There is no way to apply every last color to everything in the picture, so I try to tint the photograph the way I remember the place. I put in just enough color to make it look real.”
At a time when photography was strictly a black and white process, hand tinting became popular as a means to present a more realistic image; though decidedly more subtle and impressionistic than modern color photography.
“Before I took up hand tinting, I was never aware of how fast the landscape could change colors before my eyes. I learned to take more time to really look at all the different tints and hues in the scene.”
While the practice enjoyed something of a revival in the mid-1960s, by then Hubbard had already earned awards and accolades nationwide for his sizable portfolio of hand tinted images of the landscape and culture in these regions he essentially called home.