In my Life

Dear Chroniclers,

whilst Fetlock was dusting down the Library the other day he came across a rather precious photographic album. The good man, recognising its significance, fetched it out for me.

Here's an entry from it, and I wonder if you may recognise the ill-proportioned Churchill look-alike sitting up to do oratory duty before the assembled masses. It's none other than your very own apprentice horologist, spun back in time to a lost world of candy-box coloured innocence called childhood.

Fast films

The colouration in question results from an early example of Kodak Ektachrome slide film which, from research and conjecture, I believe to have been a staple in my late father's camera-bag. In its time Ektachrome was reputedly the fastest film available to the amateur photographer. Unfortunately, whilst a marked improvement on what went before, the colour-reproduction of the initial version fell somewhat short of modern-day standards.

There remains, however, a certain charm to Ektachrome's warm and mellow tones that not even the most extensive digital colour palette can quite reproduce. It's like wallowing luxuriantly in a Sunday afternoon bath and recalling the summery days of youth.

In the dark

I have fond memories of standing beside the Captain in his Dark Room - a rather grand name for what was in fact a converted outside toilet, mercifully stripped of its former fixtures. I recall the exotic scent of strange chemical substances and a dim green light, which was the only source of illumination in this small, damp hideaway. I suspect the Captain came here to escape the icy clutches of the Black Dowager.

There was a huge enlarger on the bench opposite the door. It was here the Captain would stand, deciding where to crop and burn his photographs. I loved to watch him fetch out a sheet of virgin white paper and place it underneath as he reached up to focus the lens. A moment or two later the exposed sheet would be transported across to the developer tray and dunked into its first wash of chemicals.

Developing

Amidst the swirling, pungent waters, strange shadowy forms would begin to appear on the surface of the paper. Within seconds they would take substance, bold black and strong in contrast. And as my beady child-eyes peered up at the bench the Captain would seize the sheet in a pair of tongs and transport it across to the second tray - a bath of fixative - and thence into a deep Belfast sink with the cold-tap turned open wide.

What magic!

In the Picture

On the rare occasion, the Captain would even allow me to press the shutter-release button, usually after his camera had been secured firmly to a stout tripod and focussed on the subject matter in hand. For the most part, however, my place in his photographic life lay on the other side of the lens.

He took many pictures of the family in his time here, sadly all too many of them disappearing during the regular purges instigated by the Black Dowager to remove as many memories of her late husband as possible.

Rescued Memories

The photograph above was taken on slide-film, the Captain's preferred medium. I rescued it some years ago from the bottom of an old, battered crate tucked away in the darkest depths of a garage. It came as part of a package numbering some three hundred or so similar items, many of which were showing pronounced signs of deterioration.

Thanks, however, to the miracles of modern-day technology I was able to arrange for the best of them to be scanned onto disk, following which I spent many a happy hour in the company of our trusty PC and an early version of Photoshop Elements.

It was truly a fascinating process cleaning up the raw scans - dust was removed, photographs cropped and levels tweaked. The best part of all was looking at a distant, but familiar world through the eyes (or more correctly, the lens) of the Captain. Do you ever long to see things a different way? Then try taking a real close look at a familiar picture and see what it tells you about the person who captured the image.

The shelves fill

Those childhood forays into the Dark Room served me well; in time they set me on my own photographic journey. It started in my twenties when mrs electrofried bought me my first camera - a Fujica STX-1, if you're really interested!

This marvellous instrument taught me priceless lessons. Aside from a simple electronic exposure meter everything else was manual - no zoom lens nor automatic focus, no wind-on nor self-loading mechanisms. Simplicity taught me everything and I have a number of images captured on that camera which bear favourable comparison with photographs I've taken with much more sophisticated, and expensive equipment. One or two have even graced this meandering blog.

Over time the shelves have filled. When I last counted them, there were one hundred and twenty three albums in all charting the history of my own family. And that's not including the albums I make up every Christmas for our children - they each have one to represent another year of their lives.

You see, I so much want them to have precious dreams, not some dusty cast-offs consigned to the darkness.

A Challenge

And with that thought in mind, here's a challenge this week for my honoured guests at the House of Electrofried. Get out a picture you really like, look at it and then type a few lines in the comments box to share it with others.

Until the next time we meet,

my very best regards

electrofried (mr)