Upnor and the Medway

Well finally managed to shoot a few frames of new images. Down by the Medway and being out of the wind it was almost trying to be warm. The light was not great but with a bit of post processing, got a reasonable image.

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.

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!

Ford Focus

Today is the last day with my Ford Focus. Having owned this car longer than I have owned any car in my life, and putting about 80,000 miles on it we are getting a replacement.

There are few cars that I have loved and in the past only one I have hated, heres looking at you Peugeot 405!

This Focus has done its job but now its a bit big for V to enjoy to drive so off it goes.

Below are some of my collection of pictures with the car in them.

Llangrannog

I guess anyone who has a collection of old family photographs has some photographs that they can't associate with any of their relatives.

In my case I have a collection of prints of pictures taken all over Great Britain. Some I can recognise but most are of unknown locations. 

A very few of the pictures have a location written on the back but most don't. 

The composition of the pictures are all of good quality, far more than casual snaps. Very few have people in them. Infact more have horse and carts than people.

The main set of images that are annotated are from the small port of Llangrannog, located on the Welsh coast of Cardigan Bay near Newport.

It is hard to date these images. I would have a guess that they date from the turn off the 19/20th Century.

The Minack

The Minack theatre built into the cliffs near Porthcurno I. Cornwall. Will always have a pull on my heart. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I spent every summer holiday there. 

My intro to the theatre was through an old friend of the family. 

Lawrence and Gertie were coming to the end of their time managing the theatre and their final year was the 49th year of productions. Over a couple of summers I photographed the theatre and my pictures were published in the golden jubilee calendar of 1982.  

I returned that year and photographed the production of Shakespeare  The Tempest. Which had also been the first production put on in 1932. The new manager, who also was the director of the production, was an ex teacher and had brought the production down with a theatre group in Kent.  

One of the dressers was a colleague of his from his school. 

But that is another story. !!!

Christmas dinner.

There was almost a crisis in our house this christmas, It was possible that V was going to have to cook our christmas dinner.

Due to a curve ball thrown into my work roster it looked as though I was working on boxing day, the day when we were having our christmas dinner. 

Don’t ask why we were a day late that is another story. As I was not going to be there we realised that she had never cooked christmas dinner in her life. This job had always fallen to me. 

This also got me thinking about what I had learnt over the years cooking christmas dinner. The following are things I have learnt.

1 Christmas dinner time is the time that christmas dinner is served.

2 You will always have too much veg

3 You will never have enough roast potatoes

4 No-one ever wants christmas pud after dinner.

5 When carving the turkey ensure that it is breast side up.

6 No alcohol can be consumed until the correct cooking time for the meat         has been calculated.

7 Do not calculate the cooking time for the meat based on the price per             Kilo.

8 Everyone MUST eat at least one sprout.

9 Yorkshire pudding goes with anything

10 If cooking christmas dinner in an unfinished kitchen, in an oven installed         the previous day, ensure the guests include one child having its first               christmas, no-one will care about dinner.

11 Nothing is funnier than a one year old eating sprouts for the first time.

12 No-one will agree on what you had last year.

13 The starter will be forgotten about until just before the main course is             ready to be served. 

14 No one can agree what wine to have.

04:48 22 December 2015

Starting a new project at the New Year is a recipe for failure! 

New year resolutions have become the subject of many jokes and are almost a euphemism for a failed endeavour.  How many diets, exercise regimes and 'new me' projects , are started in the post alcoholic glow of the new year, only to flicker and die into cold ash by the middle of January?

Far better to fall into the deeper rhythms of the year and take the winter solstice as cue to start a new project. The Solstice marks the turning of the year, the shortest day and the longest night, the deepest and darkest time of the year, everyday after the solstice is a day on the climb up to the heat and light of high summer. 

Starting at the solstice also gives some time to get into the rhythm for the project before the new year hits, with all its distractions.

These ten days get you through the death zone for a project when the first rush of excitement is over and the realisation of exactly what has been taken on starts to become obvious, push through these days and the rhythms  start to  become embedded and what looks like an impossible task becomes more manageable. 

It also helps to set realistic goals for any project. Far better to go for three times a week rather than every day. 
Set the target as 'every day' and the first time you miss a deadline then you have failed. Set the target as three of four times a week and the odd missed day has not poisoned the project. 

In the past I have done time limited projects with differing degrees of success. My picture a day between the spring and autumn equinox on Pbase was a success while others on Instagram have run for a time and then faltered as the inspiration fades or self set limits became inhibiting. 

The new aim for this blog will be for three posts a week. With a mix of new images, old images and more wordy posts with stories from my time working as a commercial photographer. 

I am not setting a time limit on how long it will last but my hope is to have a long run at this post rate. 

Guest blog

For the first time I did a guest blog post for another blogger.

Where we we on holiday in the summer was a wonderful greek island called Symi. A British writer who lives on the island as a daily blog. At the moment he is on holiday and was looking for content, I made contact and a guest post was the result.

Symi Dream

Good fun and something I hope to do again.

Agia Marina Beach Symi

The last beach we visited on our short stay on Symi was Agia Marina. We got the same taxi boat as our trip to St Nicks. The cost was slightly more from memory.

Agia Marina is the most developed of the beaches and almost has a country club feel to it. There are green lawns palm trees and a restaurant that serves good food.

The beach is small and sandy, and the sun loungers are all on hardstandings. The cost of the loungers is the same as St Nicks but no discount for using the taverna. We sat in the shade of a tree and all day we had geckos running around under the loungers.

When we first arrived we had mixed feelings about the beach but the day was very relaxing and at the end we both agreed that it had been a good day.