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I brought a large box of pictures from Mums house when I cam back south this week. This afternoon I went through them to try and get rid of some of the images that hold no interest to the family.

Many pictures I had taken and sent to my parents so they had pictures of the children when they were growing up. But one picture caught my eye. This is the last picture taken of me and my father.

We would have been up on holiday in the lats summer and were packing the car for the drive south. Daughter would be 10 month old and it was hugs and goodbyes. then we had no idea that it would be the last time we would be together.

It looks as though we are arguing but it just a fleeting expression on my father's face.

Knapps

Had a good walk around the village including a full circuit of the Knapps

January ending

Been very busy and with no time to take many pictures, so just a few pictures from the end of January

Catch Up

Been travelling for the past few days. So this is a catch up of the lsat images from Scotland, a walk at Penrith and a weekend in Wales.

The Army

in 1983 the railway line from Kilmacolm to Glasgow closed. In the early 90's after the track had been removed it reopened as a cycle path and footpath. 

Along its course several art installations were installed. One which seems to be made up of old gas cylinders, bits of track and hose shoes was set out as a small platoon of soldiers. situated about half way to Bridge of Weir, it was seen as a good point to turn around when walking.

Infra Red

Years ago I had a Nikon D70 converted to be sensitive to Infra Red light. I bought a conversion kit from  Lifepixel and had Myles Whitehead, who is the camera technician who looks after my cameras, do the conversion.

The camera has not had the focus system adjusted to correct the point of focus for IR light, but with careful technique that is not a problem.

The results are very different to a colour camera and I go through spells of using the camera mixed in with long gaps when it sits in my camera case.

Over the last week I got the camera out and started to enjoy using it again.

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.

500th post and my first photo.

While I was looking at my blog post list I found that this will be my 500th post to the www.thelightroom.blogspot.co.uk  I have been posting since July 2009.
Compare this the majority of blogs that only have a couple of posts before they get abandoned, I feel reasonably proud.
For a bit of fun for this 500th post I thought I would find the very first pictures that I took along with the original camera used to take them.

Being the collector that I am, I still have, and can find both!

The camera used was the family camera. A Kodak Brownie Cresta II. The camera was manufactured by Kodak UK between 1956 and 1959. It uses 120 film and shot 12  2 1/4" square images per roll. Looking at these dates and the family pictures I guess that the camera was bought when I was born. All the pictures taken prior to my birth are on a rectangular format and when I arrive they switch to a square format.

I am not sure what date that I took my first images as they are in a folder with some other images which I can date to 1967. The negatives are also in the folder but for some strange reason there are two sets of negatives with the same number. As the 1967 images are better quality I know that these first two images were taken earlier.

Also written on the print folder is the processing and printing costs. It looks as though the cost for processing and printing 12 B&W images in 1967 was 7/9d which is about 40p in todays money. Corrected for inflation that is £6.66.

I can remember taking my first picture.

We were on a family walk around the Knapps which is a small man made Loch near where we lived. I can't remember if I asked to be allowed to take a picture or if I was just given the camera but I did one negative that day.

Some time later we were on a day trip to Largs and took the backroad to Fairlie. As you drop off the moors there was a stream and a waterfall that Dad liked to stop at. 

Neither image is very sharp but I managed to get a reasonable composition, got what I wanted in the picture and managed to keep my finger out of the way of the lens. 

So the last three points are all you need for success in photography!

Part one

Today was the day that I had set aside as a 'me' day, with the only aim was to do some photography. The weather forecast was good and with snow on the hills the only sensible choice was to go north. But before I did that I had a run out to the Knapps before breakfast. At this time of the year it takes some time for the sun to come up over the hills and hit the water. The wind was blowing strongly from the from the north and it was bitter standing waiting for the light. 

When the light came up I managed to find some nice images which set the day up well for my trip up north.

Knapps Loch

When I get back to the village I try and get to visit a few old haunts. This morning I was out at the Knapps, a loch just outside of the village. I have been walking around here all my life and my very first picture was taken here.
This morning it was freezing fog, so the images were studies of tones rather than broad sweeping views.