Category: Older Photographs

Time-Warp Tuesday: Just a Memory

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Today’s image is from the summer of 1977, and I again go back to my grandparent’s acreage outside Truro, Nova Scotia. This old see-saw, like everything else there, is long gone. Only the silver in the negative seems to be immortal.

SeeSaw in Old Barns, Nova Scotia
I don’t remember if I ever printed this negative back in the 70’s, and certainly never looked at it all that closely. What amazes me is the sharpness of most of the image. My old Yashica TL-Electro was very much a budget model, a few rungs below the Nikon, Canon and Pentax classics of the day. But the 50mm f1.9 lens that came with the camera had a reputation for amazing sharpness, and that reputation was deserved.

Time-Warp Tuesday: Ghost of Christmas Past

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Christmas memories, and how times have changed, so for Time-Warp Tuesday this week I have a Kodachrome slide; I made this image, a close-up of an ornament on the family Christmas tree sometime between 1980-82.

Tree Ornament, 1982?

This slide looks pretty much like it did when I first took the image; the colours and sharpness have remained true. So much else about Christmas has changed though: relatives have passed on, and at the same time a new generation has arisen to be part of my Christmas memories.

My late mother was very proud of her Christmas tree ornaments, and her tree decorating. If such a thing as Yuletide Feng Shui existed, she was the master. Now the collection is spread out amongst various family members, so we will never see a single tree like that again. All we have are images like this one, capturing the memory of Christmas treasures.

 

Time-Warp Tuesday: The Eternal Summer

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This week’s time warp doesn’t go back as my other time warps to date.  The image below is not even analog film, but a digital image created in late summer, 2004 using my old Canon Digital Rebel. The picture is a portrait of my niece, sitting on the deck of my sister’s cottage.

katie-at-the-dock

In Canada, summer is a temporary, uncertain season; we know that the inevitable shadow of winter is lurking beneath the horizon. But for a moment, whether the moment that is summer or the seeming moment that is childhood, time can stand still, allowing us to contemplate the peace, contentment and joy of that fleeting time.

In the six years that have passed, we have known plenty of winter in the relentless passing of time; childhood has been left behind, loved ones have passed away, and summer has often seemed distant. At least a photograph allows us to perceive a visual echo of a perfect, eternal moment.

Timewarp Tuesday: Kodachrome Then

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It was 1981; I was in first year university and in a serious relationship with the woman in the image below. The image was captured using Kodachrome 64 and my old Yashica TL-Electro. I remember going through almost the entire roll of film (an extravagance back then for me) taking pictures of my girlfriend in the leaves.

Among the Leaves

The slides have been in storage now for almost three decades, but being Kodachrome, the colours have held up quite well, and if I continue to store them properly, they will last for quite some time to come.  So much has changed in my life since then (relationships, where I live etc.) but Kodachrome did capture the moment,  and made the moment immortal in a way that I don’t think digital can.

Timewarp Tuesday: Murphy the Cat

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I’ve been having fun (since I got my film scanner) of going back into my old negatives and scanning pictures I took decades ago, and posting the occasional one here, but I realize that this could be a trap if I’m not careful; I need to keep working on new images.

I’ve decided therefore to only blog one older image a week, hence Timewarp Tuesday. I made this image below with my old Yashica TL-Electro, c. 1977 (the year I got this camera). The film was Ilford HP-4, push processed to either E.I. 800 or 1600, probably the latter, based on the amount of grain in the image.

Murphy the Cat

Our pet cat Murphy was the perfect subject for black & white; this rather scraggly domestic longhair was a furry grey scale; the only colour was in his eyes, but everywhere else he had every shade from white to black and back again.

Paying the Price

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Since 1977, when I took today’s picture of a close-up of iris petals, I have moved about 6 times, and sadly I have lost the original slide. This is one of my favourite pictures, but all I have left is a slightly damaged Cibachrome print I made of it in the early 1980’s. I have always been somewhat disorganized when it comes to slides, negatives, etc. and this time it bit me!

An object lesson to take care of ones pictures, whether analog or digital.

Yellow Flower 1977

Can We Still Make These Pictures?

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It’s about time I started a Photography blog, but instead of a new picture, I will start with an old one, a picture I took in the early 1980’s at a fountain in Toronto’s Eaton Centre:

Scan-100912-0002

This is one of my favourite older photographs, but I wonder, what would happen if I tried to take this picture today?

Shooting pictures of kids in public has become a suspicious activity at best, and it saddens me that one of the best subjects is verging on becoming taboo, unless the parents know the photographer.