Tag: scans

Pride in 2002

Pride in 2002: Back in 2002 Pride was still in black and white, or at least the pictures I posted on My London Diary were, as were those I took to the picture library I was then working with. They still only worked with black and white prints and colour transparencies and I was working with colour negative.

Pride in 2002

It would have been possible for me to convert those colour negatives into transparencies, but it wasn’t worth the time and expense in the hope of possible sales to do so.

Pride in 2002

For my personal use and to exhibit work I could make colour prints – and I had crammed a colour processor into my darkroom so could feed the exposed Fuji paper in at one end, shut the lid and let the machine do the rest before I took the print to the print washer.

Pride in 2002

I had a smart colour enlarger with a linked probe that at least almost got the necessary filtration somewhere close, though I always ran at least one test strip – and often 2 or 3 – before making the final print. Making prints was a rather tedious business working in near total darkness with just a very, very dim sodium light.

Pride in 2002

The way forward was obviously to scan negative film to provide digital files, but in 2002 the equipment I had was fairly primitive and the scans I produced in 2002 looked rather poor, which is probably why I only posted the black and white images on My London Diary at the time. Scanning the black and white 10×8″ press prints gave rather better results.

Back then I only wrote two short paragraphs about the event in My London Diary – and here they are in full (with the usual corrections):

July started for me with the annual Pride march. This year it was probably the smallest I’ve attended, and was a rather sad event compared to previous years.

It was enlivened a little by some visitors from Brazil, but the whole thing seems to be more of a commercial event now. Much less fun and joy.

For this post I’ve revisited some of those 2002 scans and improved them significantly with the aid of some smart sharpening and other minor adjustments to post here. You can click on these colour images to see them larger.

Most of the colour images are of the same subjects as I took in black and white, and at least for some I still prefer them in black and white. But generally I think the event is best seen in colour.

More black and white pictures start here on My London Diary.

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Trade Justice Parade 2001

Twenty years ago today on 3rd November 2001 I wrote:

the trade justice parade was a serious event but also we were having some fun. the world trade organisation isn’t at all amusing, but i loved the t-shirt that said ‘wto – unsuitable for anyone with a conscience.

giant pound signs, balloons, a hug fat cat, the wto dragon, pirates and everyone made it an event to remember.

speakers included naomi klein (author of ‘no logo’) and sergio cobo from mexico.

My London Diary

And with the article I posted the two black and white images shown here. But I think most of the pictures I took of the parade were in colour, taken on colour negative film. But the only work I was putting in to a picture library back then was in black and white – and then still 8×10″ prints. There was still greater demand for black and white, and some of the pictures I took in colour I printed as black and white. The library would have taken colour, but mostly they worked with colour transparencies.

But I had recently bought a scanner with which I could scan colour negative film and it had software that could produce positive results with something like the correct colours. The results were not great and seemed to accentuate the faults in the negatives and exaggerate flare. The results were certainly not of professional quality as you can probably see – even after I have improved the pictures in Lightroom.

A year after I made these pictures I bought my first DSLR and things changed, though it took a while for the library and some other outlets to shift to accept digital files, and for a little while I was still taking black and white film for the prints they wanted as well as digital colour. But things changed quite rapidly to an all-digital world.

Going back to the negatives I’m sure I could now make much improved digital versions than these by ‘camera scanning’ – using a DSLR to photograph them and then Negative Lab Pro software to convert them to positives. It’s good news for those of us with archival material on colour negative film. But I can see no reason at all for wanting to take film again when digital produces so much better results with much less hassle.

The issues people were protesting about in the Trade Justice Parade are still very much with us – and in the UK the government last week passed yet another act hastening the privatisation of our NHS, while many of the same issues that were brought up by the protest are behind the failures to deal effectively with climate change. The huge greed for consumption and wealth of a small minority of the ultra-rich underlie both; they are not ‘high net worth’ but ‘high global liability.’