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)