It's taken me far too long! I recently found one of my old photo albums from my childhood, with all the photographs neatly labelled and dated. I was amazed to find that some were dated from when I was just 1989! I was nine years old. There's some interesting photographs there; 90% of which were from Vintage Sports Car Club track days at Mallory Park, Curborough or Cadwell Park.
They've given me an urge to shoot more film but more importantly to develop it myself. At this point, why just shoot film when you can get more hands on and develop it yourself too. I've a number of film cameras to use, a Yashica Electro and a couple of other Yashica Rangefinders, Nikkormat FTn, Yashica FX-2 and a Pentacon Six. These are just some cameras I've picked up over the years but never shot any quantity of film from them. I took the Yashica Electro to Iceland a few years ago but the film has been sat waiting to be developed since.
We'll get in to developing in a later blog post; how I've gone about it, what process etc but for now this is about the old prints and negatives.
I've had piles of DoublePrint envelopes with all my prints in for years and have digitally photographed a few of the prints before but I really wanted to get the negatives stored and organised better. I'll be looking out for a good quality film scanner, probably the Epson V700, over the next few months so that I can get all these old negatives scanned in so I can do a small photobook of my old photographs.
Turns out I have a lot more negatives than I thought, so I hadn't ordered enough sleeves at all. I have twelve rolls sleeved up, and I probably need another 10.
Sleeving the negatives up was straight forward enough. DoublePrint cut the negatives down to strips of four, and the sleeves I grabbed were perfect for this. The sleeves themselves are slightly translucent so I'll definitely need to remove them to scan.
I've been excited to shoot and develop some film and having dug these out to organise the negatives has only fueled that urge even more, so, that's where I'm heading now. I've got my Yashica FX-2 loaded up with some Kodak Tri-X and I'm off out to shoot a roll, and as promised, I'll pop up a post about the developing of the film later.
Until then, I'll leave you with some of the photographs, including my favourite, the E-Type E.R.A. that you'll have no doubt seen before... I post it up a lot.
See you anon
Chris!