Little Know Fact

It is a little know fact that I am a paid writer!

Surprised?

Well if your not, I am!

It goes back 20 years to when I wrote an article for a monthly magazine called 'Prepress World"

As you can guess this was a specialist magazine aimed at the prepress industry. In the mid 90's the industry was in the middle of the change from analog to digital. All the old skills and processes were dying and digital was the new kid in town, and I could see photography was going go through the same seismic changes in the near future, and the magazine wanted a working photographers view of the state of the photography industry and the changes that digital was starting to bring.

To put things in context. In 1995 the Apple QuickTake camera was launched as the first camera to be able to connect to a computer.  Kodak had the DCS460 a 6 megapixel camera based on a Nikon body costing then £25,250 which is about £34,000 today.
We were still 4 years away from the Nikon D1 which was my first digital camera and the first affordable pro spec digital camera.

Photoshop had been released in 1988 and by 1995 had reached version 3 and had been able to run on Windows for 3 years.

The article I wrote was very much on the limitations of the current digital cameras as they existed at the time but I did look forward to the future at the end of the article, and here I am pleased to see I managed to get a few predictions correct, or nearly correct.

First I predicted that the new technology  in photography would have little of the destructive effect on jobs and skills as was being seen by prepress.
Part right, but not in the way I thought and also very wrong in other ways.

The technology has put the ability to create professional images in the hands of almost anyone and there are many more people claiming to be photographers today, but, and its a big but, images are now treated as a commodity and any industry that has over supply has a price crash for stock images.

I  also predicted that there would not be a reduction in the number of photographers in the industry as the capturing of the image was only the very last step in the creative process, and everything up to that point would remain the same.  Wrong in that that there are many more photographers but right in that the number of full time professional photographers has not gone down greatly.

Second that I would no longer need to carry lots of equipment around.

Spot on!
If I was setting up my business now I would be buying very different equipment to what I bought in 1988. The cost would be the same but it would be different. lighter and more compact.

My final paragraph was :-

"The near future is going to be based on traditional technology, with digital cameras slowly becoming used where applicable, and into the mixture for the futures the tendency to keep alive , rediscover, and adapt processes from the past.  Silver halide has a life for years to come."

Well I got my first digital camera in 2001 just over 5 years after I wrote this article. The last roll of film I shot commercially was in 2004 9 years after the article. So that covered the near future.

As for the rediscovery of old processes, there has been a renaissance in old and almost forgotten processes. Only in the last week a first for wet plate collodion. The only process that seems to have died with no hope of resurrection is Kodachrome.

Silver halide is still around and the decline appears to have bottomed out. Lots of choice has been lost as have some of the big names. Prices have gone up, and the choice of places to process have greatly reduced, but for the moment we still have film in an increasingly digital world.

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.

Reflections

I got out for a short time with my camera and went down to the old fish ponds. It is still very wintery but as the water level is high I found some nice refections to photograph.

Bletchley Park

We have been wanting to visit Bletchley Park for some time. V had visited a few years ago and said it was well worth going again. Since her visit, the site has had a large lottery fund grant and has much more to see.

We were there for 4 hours and saw only a small part of what there was to see. So I think we will be back again some time soon.

Hythe

The sun was out and we are both of work so a day trip to Hythe seemed in order. A few shots from the military canal and an amazing sign found under the town hall.

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.