Tuesday 10 April 2012

That was then

It's anon. More dusty, scratchy negatives scanned (badly) and some pictures to post. But first it's time to mull over what the process has revealed to me.

First off I looked at the images and wondered why I took most of them. They're just snaps. However, as I was going through the films in the order they were taken I hit a point where they began to be more than simply 'of' the things I was photographing. They were becoming composed. This may be coincidence, or it may not, but the point where a leap appeared to be made coincided with my beginning to look at photographs (and paintings) by people who works were (still are) 'the real deal'. Prior to that my photo-viewing had been done via the pages of Amateur Photographer and Practical Photography. I guess what you look at informs how you see.

The second thing that struck me, even more forcibly, is that the photographs' meanings have changed with time. Even some of the ones with little aesthetic merit have gained a significance they didn't have at the time. Those are the ones which depict places that have altered, buildings that have been demolished. They were nothing more than snaps, now they are historical documents.

A third revelation is how many of the pictures I never printed are actually worth printing. Working as images. Either I wasn't aware of what I'd done at the time, or just, as plausibly, I couldn't manage to make decent prints - or even couldn't afford to make prints!

Finally it has become plain that I not only still shoot the same subjects (I've found quite a few photographs of pigeons) but I use similar compositional devices to those I was using 30 years ago. That must be my 'style' at work!

Anyway, here's a few.

This one I did print out at the time.

I have never printed this one.

Another unprinted picture.

The bus station is no longer a bus station
What has been very evident is that even a basic DSLR today is capable of much better results at ISO 400 than I managed with HP5 in 1980! It's only when looking back at how things used to be that we realise what we have now. It might do the pixel peepers good to put a roll of HP5 through a camera and develop it in a blacked out bathroom with no heating or double glazing on a cold night in March, and then print it in the same bathroom with light leaking under the door using a Russian enlarger with a dodgy lens. Kids today don't know they're born!

It did surprise me, though, to see I was experimenting with various film stock. There were a couple of rolls of the then new XP1, and the negatives are much finer grained than those from HP5, and seem to have a better dynamic range. Of course that could be due to my hopeless home developing technique with no temperature control over the fluids. I must say that the small JPEGs look worse on the screen that the larger files do when printed at 5x7 by my cheap ink-jet printer. This final one is on XP1.

The 'building' is gone and the land behind has been 'developed'.

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