Old photos

I recently indulged and bought a scanner that will not only scan negatives, but even medium format negatives. (It's the Epson Perfection V500, for you techies out there). So I've been trawling back through my old negatives and testing it out.

A few years ago I had the chance to try out a twin lens reflex camera, and took a reel of 120 film on the beach at North Berwick - all of 12 photos on one reel! Those old time photographers really must have taken their time composing, thinking, re-composing, assessing, before they pressed the shutter to capture that image. I remember that using the camera was tricky - you hold the camera in front of you at chest height and compose the image by looking down from above, and the image view is mirrored, so it was kind of hard to get the horizon straight and move the camera the right way to change the composition.

Scanning the negatives was sort of tricky too - either I hadn't exposed them properly, or the film is thicker than the scanner expects, but they needed a fair amount of jiggling, both pre- and post scanning, to get a nice enough image. But I quite like the results. I think they just feel reassuringly old fashioned. Here's one.

(c) Brighid Ó Dochartaigh