Bigger than the Beatles?

Another regret is not taking more photographs when I used to spend the summers playing music and recording it with a couple of friends from school and the occasional other 'musician'. But thenit's difficult to photograph something you are doing yourself. Going through my files it's become clear that the pictures I have printed in the past are in worse condition than those I've never, or rarely, printed. Dust, scratches. The works. I am also learning that scanned files are not as easy to process as today's digital raw files. Shadows and highlights can't be recovered as easily. That has to be done at the scanning stage, and is a whole new curve to be learned. or not, in my case. Near enough is close enough for rock'n'roll.

The next three are unusual for their use of a flash gun.

I can't remember who took the next shot. But it's pretty good - apart from the dodgy geezer playing the bass...

I have a dim memory of some pictures of us, including our irregular drummer, setting up in a garage, but they are not in my neatly collated files. Perhaps they are in a box or cupboard somewhere, or perhaps I'm imagining them. One picture I have found which I thought was imaginary is a (rare) colour photo of the village corn mill. The mill has been replaced by houses. Which makes me wonder if I took the photo around the time the mill was to be demolished, knowing it would be gone soon.

There area couple of frames of the mill in black and white which are next on my list for scanning. It's a slow process though. With over 50 sheets of negatives, and a slow scanner which renders the computer unable to do anything else while scanning, it's going to take me a while to digitise all the frames I want to. Even at two per sheet.

The number of shots in portrait orientation continues to surprise me. However I have found one in landscape which I'm liking at least as much as the one in portrait which I have printed in the past.

There is also a picture of Preston market in the same format which I have no memory of at all. I'm guessing I took it with my 50mm lens fitted with my x2 teleconverter judging by the compression of space.

This little project is once again proving that there is more to photography than making stunning pictures. Some are being scanned for nostalgia's sake, some as documents of things no longer around, and a very few because they are good pictures. None of these reasons for making photographs has, to my mind, any greater merit than the rest. 'Just a snap' can turn into something more with the passage of time. It's also pretty clear to me that the 'image quality' is unimportant when the subject matters.

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