Burnham on Crouch

 An afternoon walking around Burnham.

Tanygrisiau

 Got a day walking in the slate quarries at Tanygrisiau in Snowdonia. Weather was not great so definitely a day for Black and White.

B&W day

 Another very gray day. the pictures seem to work better in B&W today. 

Evening light and Spooky House.

Walked around to friends for dinner last night. some lovely evening light and then I passed a really spooky house.

Gravesend

It was a day for B+W today.

1970's snow and fog

At the moment I am going through my collection of B&W film negs and getting them digitised. This is all being done by camera, so the files while large are not as good as scans. The big advantage is that it is much faster. I am able to copy 5 or 6 rolls per hour.


Lots of the images are not very interesting but occasionally I find something worth working on in photoshop.

One roll I found was of a snowy and foggy day down by the river near home. It must have been about 1976 or 7 but as I never noted any info on these rolls that is just a bit of a guess.

Old images.

Strangely I have shot no new material since Christmas. With the weather not being great with rain and the storms when I have had the time for shooting. Also being ill and now tacking my second course of Amoxicillin for the year. Plus having the hassle of changing the car, and all the other distractions that come along in life I am feeling bad about their being no new images.

But what I have been doing is starting to digitise my collection of old B+W negatives. For years I have scanners that can handle any film. They produce big high quality files but are too slow for large volumes of files.

It had been going through my mind that there is an faster way to produce files that are big enough and high enough quality for my needs. Remember these are mostly 35mm negs shot since about 1973 on all sorts of different films. All home processed and filed carefully but not stored in archival conditions plus I have thousands of them.

Using my digital camera, macro lens that will shoot 1:1, a copy stand, lightbox and the neg holders from one of my scanners, I am able to produce good enough file and record a 24 exposure film in about ten minutes.

It also has the advantage of giving much bigger images of the files than a contact sheet and lets me recover incorrectly exposed or processed images. These images would have been impossible to print in the past but with photoshop the finished files can be adjusted to produce acceptable results.

But what has been an even bigger surprise is the images that I have no memory of tacking.
In the first half dozen rolls I have found pictures of events I had forgotten about, places I don't remember going, and people I can't recall.

Before the fall

Remember the location but can't recall the names of the girls.

Skating on thin ice.

Remember the Knapps freezing and skating many times. But don't recall photographing it.

Wintry road

Again I recall the road but not the snow.

Renault at Eurotunnel

In about 1990 I got a call from a PR man I had known for some time with  the offer of a job that I may be interested in.

The brief was to photograph some vehicles at the Eurotunnel visitors centre at Folkestone. For those who are too young to remember, this was a tourist attraction set up across the M20 from where the tunnel terminal is now. Inside was information about what was going to happen with the new tunnel.

Outside was a paved area where we had received permission to park vehicles for the shoot.

On the day of the shoot the car and the truck arrived from the UK but the coach was brought over from France as it was not available in the UK.

The image was set up with several different coinfgureations and one was chosen for the print run.

The print run was the fun bit as Renault wanted the information printed on the front of the image and they wanted too have a run of 1600 prints. 

If it was now then that would be no problem as the text and logo could be added digitally, the file sent of and in a day or two prints would be delivered. 

in 1990 this was very different and I needed to build a temporary setup to be able to hand print all the prints as easily as possible.

Getting the copy approved and type set was not a problem. I then had it sized so that it was the right size for the print. The typeset film was cut to give a straight edge along the top. this was then stuck into the printing frame. 

I then needed to set up a way of exposing the text. I built a triangular box about 30cm high and 3cm wide with a light bulb in the point and the open bottom of the triangular box sitting on the typeset film. The light bulb was wired to a variable transformer and connected too the timer that was also connected to the enlarger.  This triangular box was attached to the masking frame and stuck down on the typeset film so all the light leaks were sealed and that the light bulb was only exposing through the film and no light was fogging the rest of the image. 

I then needed to find the correct exposure for the the negative of the vehicles, once I found that I then went back to set the lightbulb exposing for the text. By adjusting the variable transformer I got the correct intensity for the lightbulb, so that the correct exposure time for the text was the same as the time for the negative.

It was then simply a matter of putting paper in the masking frame pushing the button on the timer. The timer switch on the enlarger and the bulb for the text for the same time, at the end of the exposure the paper was removed and put in the processor and 90 seconds later a correctly exposed print cam out.

Seeing in the new year.

Seeing in the New Year, out on the street watching for fireworks and lanterns.

Park in the Market