Discovering Wonderful Things

Recently, it was my birthday, and I bought myself a new toy...

Isn't it pretty?

It's called a film scanner. It's not the best film scanner in the world, nor the cheapest, but it does what it's supposed to do, and really rather well.

Why did I want one? Because I have boxes and boxes full of stuff like this....

and even more boxes of other stuff like this ...

I've been taking photographs since I was about 12, and before that my dad was a photographer too. Back then we both shot everything on film, we sent the film off to places like "Boots the Chemist" to be developed and several weeks later (imagine that - we had to wait weeks!) we got the films back again with the prints in wallets like this...

 

They were very cleverly designed to keep your prints in one side and your negatives safe in the other, like this ...

 

Sending your films away to be printed was very exciting, you had weeks of imagining how, when you got your pictures back, they would look like this...

or like this ...

When they did come back, they usually looked like this ...

 

But that was a wonderful thing, it was good to make mistakes, I learnt from making them, and sometimes those mistakes worked better than my original idea! I have my dad to thank for my love of photography, and because of him we have many, many wonderful family pictures like this ...

(that's me on the end, dressed as a camera, an outfit made by my dad, and my big brother on the other end, dressed as a Christmas present - we obviously had a lot of empty boxes lying around that year!)

Some years before my dad passed away, he give me several boxes of these wonderful things, wallets of old black and white film negatives and slides, 35mm, 120mm and more, which have lain in the cellar, waiting to be explored. Many, because dad enjoyed doing his own developing and processing, and because he often printed just one shot from a roll of 12 or 36, we have never even seen. 

Until now... and that's why I wanted this wonderful thing... 

 

And here's one from the first batch of scanning yesterday...

(me, aged about 3, in my neighbours house in Cardiff)