Tuesday 30 June 2009

Art Exhibition



The vibrancy of Eloise Govier's work speaks for itself, with broad strokes of the palette knife she creates canvases of arresting beauty. Pendre Art Gallery Cardigan info@pendreart.com

Monday 29 June 2009

Blasts from the Past










I have discovered a quick and easy way to digitize old negatives using a nikon PS5,PB4 bellows, and D300 camera. Although a film scanner will give a superior result, it is a real faff to use and takes ten times as long, by using a DSLR you literally take a photograph of each negative and then invert them and clean them up in photoshop. For many years I have been wanting to review all the millions of photos that I have taken over the past fifty years or so, but by using a film scanner this would be a daunting task. Therefore I intend to take a few pages of negatives from my film archive every day and with minimum messing about blast through them with my d300 and publish as a retro blog. It is a bit like peeling back the layers of a geological deposit the oldest records are at the bottom and the youngest are at the top. So I will begin the retro blog with the first photographs I ever took as a child, my first camera at the age of eleven years was a Kodak folding camera bought at a jumble sale, quickly followed by an Agfa Isolette which was then exchanged for a Kodak Retina. All of which took acceptable pictures but when I was about thirteen my father bought me for my birthday a secondhand Zeiss Ikon Contaflex which was a twin lens reflex 35mm camera with a fantastic quality lens. So I was very lucky to have a decent camera at a young age, I remember my Englsh teacher at St Andrews prep school, Chris Mertens, said he was very envious!