About

The earliest photos in this series were taken on an Agfa Rapid. The little Agfa camera started me on Agfa film. When I moved to more sophisticated cameras, I stuck with Agfachrome for shooting colour slides. Most of the colour photos you will see from 1968 to the late 1990s were shot on Agfachrome. I scanned them with an Epson V700, 12 at a time.

Back in the film days, I thought I was very clever if I managed to squeeze 37 shots out of a roll of film, instead of the 36 I paid for. When it came to scanning them 12 at a time, my cleverness came back to haunt me, because it meant I had to do four set-ups instead of three. That fourth set-up usually hit late at night and was a bit of a pain.

In the film days, you could crop creatively when you printed photos, and for me that was only when I was printing black-and-white fim. Colour slides were displayed as shot, unless you painstakingly stuck something onto the mount to mask the slide. Colour prints were usually presented at the original crop, unless you went to the bother of having them reprinted. However, cropping is part of the photographer’s toolkit whenever it is available. Now that I have invested a great deal of time scanning old slides and colour negatives, I have taken the liberty to crop some of them to show the image at its best as I would have if I were printing them in a darkroom.

I have also retouched a little to remove scratches and spots that were too much for the scanner software, but I don’t clone out distracting subject matter. There is one exception among these images, and I will disclose in context. You’ll have to be patient because we won’t get to that one for a few decades.