My Third Eye

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.

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.

Here is an image from my recent trip to Salisbury England. It is a close-up of an old door knocker on one of the massive doors of Salisbury Cathedral. It’s also the first black and white film I’ve shot in about twenty-five years. I used a Nikon N6006 film SLR (purchased very cheaply on eBay) with a Nikon 55mm Macro lens (very sharp and also very inexpensive on eBay).

Today, I got a delivery of an ancient Minolta Dimage film scanner (again, purchased on eBay); using Vuescan software on my Mac I was up and running relatively quickly. I’ve still got a few kinks to work as I get this old beast dialed in, but expect to see more film scans posted here. For B/W close-up work, film still has a unique magic!