First up then we have my mother and me:
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| Mum and I, 1976. Eating outside and there's a squeezy milk thingmy on the table, so clearly not at home. I suspect we were on 'The Continent'. France, most likely. |
Monday 29 January 2018
Food...or maybe not
I've been trawling through The Archives recently. Trying to get the old negatives into some sort of order and see if there are any masterpieces lurking amongst the plethora of cats, dogs, trees and rabbits that seemed to fascinate me as a teenager. The answer, of course, is "No, there isn't" but there were one or two that I wanted to print so that's what I gone and did anyway and now I'm going to show them here.
First up then we have my mother and me:
Now I was thinking of entering this print (Ilford Warmtone paper, if you care, with sepia tone followed by selenium) into my local Photography Club competition next month (Theme: Food). But it's not that simple. First off, the Northern Ireland Photographic Association (NIPA), the body what runs these competitions, specifies that the remit for 'Food' is a 'still life genre' and so this shot is not appropriate. And also, since that is I myself in the foreground and therefore I did not take this snap (must have been The Brother - with my camera!) and so that again rules it out. And, while B&W prints are allowed to be toned, only a single tone is allowed and so the fact that I have toned using firstly sepia and secondly selenium rules this print out a third time. Not doing too well at this club thing, am I?
First up then we have my mother and me:
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Heck! Them rules are not always on our side, are they?
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, it's an obvious "Food" snap. No doubt! And what might have been moving inside the scene at some point has been quite effectively stopped by choosing a rather short(ish) shutter time, making it a "still life" frozen in time and space. Still inside the frames of the concept if you're asking me anyway.
Then it's the toning, of which you may or may not have done twice in two different baths. Well, I can more or less only see tones of brownish and grey in there, and they are good and plentiful if you really start counting.
Even further, the print was printed by yourself inside your own darkroom which will give you creds in millions as other might even joining the same competition with prints they never even made with their own hands. Stupid machines and some "third party person pressing print", and what may we have all?
Your brother releasing the shutter, you saying? Well... how can anyone tell as I know you, your own self, is struggling telling the two of you apart at times :))
Nah... it's a sure winner! Throw it into the lottery and have some fun. It's a brilliant photo, as you can clearly see for yourself as well :))
Cheers Roy, appreciated. I might just do that - I mean, the world isn't going to end as a result, right?! Well, hopefully not...
DeleteNope! Well, the world as we know it might end at some point, but certainly not as a result of this.
DeleteAnd should it do so anyway, at least we know who to blame :))
That photo looks like a winner to me. I have a few photos of myself as a very young child and then nothing until I went to university. And just a few of that time. Now I'm behind the camera all the time so there are very few photos of my adulthood. I'm going to my parents' house in Canada this summer and I should go through all their photo albums to see what I can find. They have a scanner so I should spend a few days scanning.
ReplyDeleteThanks Marcus. I'm the same - always behind the camera now, but perhaps that's no bad thing ;)
DeleteI'm a sucker for old photographs - hopefully you'll discover some gems in Canada!