Tuesday 8th November

My mother had a Brownie box camera, it was years old when I can first remember it and a bit battered at the corners.  It was basically a cardboard box covered with black paper and with a lens and exposure trigger in the front.  I believe the film had to be entered one sheet at a time in a slot at the back.  My mother took so few photo’s with it, it is quite hard to remember the sequence of events.  Consequently I have only a small handful of photos of me as a child, one or two completely unrecognizable baby pictures, one in Grandma’s arms, and one in my Silver Cross pram and  a few of me on beach holidays, presumably at Whitby as I look about ten in them.  I have no photos, except those in my head, of Cyprus.  I find this really strange; there they all were, my Mother, my Father, and Grandma in a foreign and spectacularly beautiful country and nobody thought to take any photographs. But then my mother let slip once that all the photo’s she had in Cyprus had mysteriously gotten lost in the move to London, whether by accident or by the hand of Grandma I am not sure.  These early snaps are really small too, about 3 inches by 3, and are so poorly focused as to be next to useless in trying to see what I might have looked like.

One of my first purchases when I was working was a semi-decent camera.  I spent quite a lot of money and bought a Compact Russian, half frame camera with a good lens and light meter and a full range of exposure times and F stops.  I also spent some time reading the instructions, and tried in my amateur way to take good pictures.  Because the process was quite complicated, checking the light, adjusting the distance to focus correctly on your subject, and the using your judgment as to shutter speed, and because developing a roll of film was quite expensive, you tended to think about the shot before taking it, avoiding lamp-posts sticking out of people’s heads, or shooting into bright sunshine, consequently the pictures, mine at least were pretty good.  I also adopted a policy of rejecting any I didn’t like as soon as I collected the pictures from the developers.  I have about three Albums full, of nicely mounted and annotated pictures, including some of Adrian and Justin I must admit.

My next camera was an Instamatic, with a drop in film cassette with automatic rewind.  This was self-focusing, or so it professed, though all too often you got a blurred background.  Because there was no light meter or F stop, only a little sunshine, a moon, and a half sun symbol, the pictures were inevitably poorer in quality.  This was so easy to use though that you got far more spontaneous pictures.  I used this for several years in Italy, and now looking back, I wish I had kept the old camera and thought about composition a bit more.

Then there were those cameras with a circular disc of film; I never got one of those but moved straight onto a digital one, a very expensive Christmas present from Edward.  I loved the fact that you could review and reject pictures before getting them developed.

And now it is all downloaded onto your computer, manipulated, cropped, anti-red-eyed, straightened, re-focused, more light, more contrast, so that the picture isn’t at all the same as the one you took.  Or now more and more people just fill up their mobile phone with tiny pirctures they have to squint at to even see.   Funny thing is, after downloading my pictures I hardly ever look at them again, yet I often get out my three old albums and pore over them.