Re-photo

The pictures I’ve selected from my colour work in 1980 are probably a fairly random cross-section of those I took, simply the pictures that I’ve scanned for some reason or other in the dozen or so years that I’ve owned a colour scanner.

It’s easy to forget that being able to easily put colour images on the web is something fairly recent. The main reason I bought my first digital camera in 1999 was to enable me to do so. I probably still have it in a drawer somewhere, a Fujifilm MX2700 which was a 2.2Mp camera, one of the leading non-professional models of the time, which gave reasonable results for web use (and with great difficulty and lengthy retouching a 6″x9″ print which was the only digital print in a large group photography show a few months later.)

Before then, I could get colour files by taking a print or slide into work and using the large flatbed scanner I had specified for the art department. It was a tricky beast to work, and while it did a reasonable job with prints, it pretty well failed with slides. I seldom bothered, and mostly used my home scanner – black and white only – to scan colour prints. Later I bought film scanners. The first, an early Canon, was pretty hopeless, but later I had a Microtek and a Minolta Multipro that gave high quality scans – but took a long time over each one.

You could of course also get high quality scans made commercially, but this was and is an expensive business. The Minolta could be coaxed to produce ‘drum scan’ quality at a file size one of London’s leading pro labs now charges £55 or more a time. Though cheaper and possibly better services are available elsewhere.

The My London Diary web site largely came about because of my switch to digital, although the early years have mainly scanned black and white images. But from the end of 2002 I had begun to work with a Nikon D100 alongside film, although it took another couple of years before I stopped using film and everything could easily be posted on my diary.

Here then is a small gallery from those colour transparencies that I have scanned from 1980 (or at least I think they are from 1980.) I think most or all of these were taken on Group 6 outings, though what was probably the only one I arranged that year was unusual in that I was the only person to turn up! My lone walk took me around Battersea and Wandsworth, including a number of views of the Thames and to the ‘Royal Laundry’. I’ve done just a little correction and removing dust etc on the scans, but most could be improved by more work – or by making new scans, but some of the originals may have deteriorated beyond redemption.

London, 1980

Wandsworth, 1980

Wandsworth, 1980

Battersea, London, 1980

Margate, 1980

Margate 1980

Margate, 1980

Wandsworth Rail Bridge and Fulham B Power Station, London, 1980

From Chelsea Bridge, London, 1980

Royal Laundry, Battersea, London, 1980

(more…)

Clapham, London. 1980

In 1980 I was usually carrying two cameras when I went out to take photographs, one loaded with black and white film, usually ASA 125 Plus X Pan in the Leica M2. In my jacket pocket, even when I wasn’t going out to take pictures I always had a small camera, a Minox 35EL with a fixed 35mm lens, one of the smallest 35mm full frame cameras. I had both 50mm f2.8 and a 35mm f1.4 for the Leica. In the middle of the year I switched to Ilford FP4, probably only because I found a cheaper source of film.

But in November there was a significant changes. Ilford had brought out the first black and white chromogenic film, XP1-400. According to Wikipedia it went on sale in January 1981, but the first roll of it I took has a few pictures of our Guy Fawkes night celebrations on November 5th, 1980 (and Christmas 1980 comes a couple of rolls later.) I had a Leicameter MR4 on my Leica M2, and it was usually good enough for conventional black and white film, but exposure became (at least for me) more critical with XP1, and I soon switched most of my black and white work to the much more accurate metering of the Olympus OM1.

London, 1980

I’d started off using the OM1 for colour transparencies, where exposure was always very critical, and had kept the camera when I upgraded to the Olympus OM2, which had an even better metering system. I think all of the colour slides from 1980 will have been taken with the OM2.

Brick Lane, London, 1980

I’d bought the OM1 with the standard 50mm f1.8 lens (there were two faster alternatives, but it didn’t seem worth paying a lot more for a bulkier and heavier lens with only a relatively small speed advantage.) I’d started too with the latest thing in lenses, one of the first popular zoom lenses, a rather bulky 70-210mm or thereabouts. It wasn’t a bad lens, but after a year or two I sold it and bought a much smaller, lighter and faster 105mm Tamron.

East End, London. 1980

Later I found a Zuiko 35mm f2.8 shift lens secondhand at a sensible price in Hull – around a hundred pounds less than in London – and added that to my kit, and later still I found a 28mm f2.8 bargain. I had to buy the 21mm f3.5 new, but the 200mm lenses (eventually both the f4 and f5 – I could never decide which I liked best) also came secondhand. But I think all of the pictures in 1980 will have been made with the 50mm or 105mm.

London, 1980

Canal, London. 1980. This may have been from a Group Six walk

In 1980 I was working in three different ways. When at home I was making regular trips to London and walking around various areas, mainly taking pictures in black and white, some of which are in my book http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/4048897-london-derives?class=book-title London Derives. One Sunday a month I would go out with a bunch of other photographers -usually between 4 and ten our us – on a photographic outing. We were enfants terrible in a photographic club who refused to take the club restrictions and conventions seriously – or perhaps we were just serious about photography in ways the club didn’t understand. At first we were a group of the club (the sixth group formed, which had, for want of a better idea called itself Group Six, though by the time I joined there were only four others.) We took it in turns to organise where to go, and these often took me to places I wouldn’t otherwise visit, including rural Wiltshire and Margate in the pictures here. Some of those along the Thames may also be from one of these outings. Any I suggested tended to be in London, while most others preferred more obviously picturesque locations.

A rather wet Wiltshire on a Group Six trip

Terry King on a Group Six outing in Pewsey, Wiltshire. 1980

The final area of my work was in Hull, where we went several times a year to stay with my parents-in-law. Much of the black and white work from there is in my book Still Occupied, but my show there also included roughly 40 colour images as well as the around 100 black and white works.

I’ve done some rough corrections on the scans that I found, some made a few years ago, but haven’t removed every blemish. It’s hard to know exactly what colour some of them should be, and I still am having to use an uncalibrated screen. Where possible I’ve tried to balance on a neutral gray with Photoshop.