Not a battery in sight

My interest in photography came from playing with my dad's old black and white kit.

Well at least catching COVID has given me the time to finish this post which I have been trying to rewrite for a while. This extra time, plus a great discovery last year, has allowed for a much more authentic rendition. 

In the original version I used a stock  image from the internet to illustrate the first camera I used and then relied on my memory to recall how the camera operated. 

The intervening forty four years means that I was a little bit sketchy on some of the details but while I was helping mum to look her digital photo frame last year, we found, tucked in the back of a drawer,  complete in its leather case, Dad's old Selfix 820 folding camera. And that is the camera that started everything. Once it was in my hands again the memories came flooding back. 

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Dad had been keen on photography in his younger days and had a suitcase full of black and white photographs that he had taken with this camera, developed and printed himself with some pretty rudimentary equipment. 

I was always interested by the camera and the whole process. It just seemed like magic to me. Dad also had some old books including the Ilford manual of photography which contained articles on every aspect of photography. From developing the exposed film and making prints from the negatives through to what ingredients went into making the development chemicals it was more useful than Google. Well perhaps not, but it was ok I had at the time and it certainly contained everything I needed to know. I read it from cover to cover.... several times.  

By the late 1960s Dad had been lured towards super 8 cine film. The moving pictures had seduced him and  he would film just about anything.  Family parties, my sister as a 9 month old shuffling through her first Christmas, Weymouth carnival, me 'sword dancing' at school (that sounds dodgy but it was the '70s so what can you expect?) or just days out. 

The cine film came in a cassette and once he had used up all the film in a cassette, he would  send his Perutz film off to the lab for processing. ( I'm not kidding,  Perutz is genuinely the brand name of the film he used. It made us kids laugh because Mum always used the word Proot as a euphemism for a fart. If there was ever a sinister smell in the room, Mum would ask,

"Have you prooted?". 

Which would have us in stitches of laughter, so you can imagine what a gigglefest, Dad's film brand was for my brothers and me).  

About a week after he had posted it, the film would  return, processed and wound onto a reel. We would have the excitement (ritual torture) of sitting down after tea and watching four and a half minutes of silent movie. Invariably the final frame would form a glorious image melt scene. These days that effect would be added in post production by some digital video editing software but in the 1970s this effect was caused by the end of the film getting stuck in the gate of the projector and gently melting as it was cooked by the heat of the projector's bulb.

If Dad had several reels of the same subject he would splice them together into longer epics. Often these splices would fail and we would be treated to multiple melt scenes followed by Dad, rethreading the projector to continue the show.

And so it is that my brother's wedding is on a reel along with my Cousin Pam's and possibly Janet's?  Also, our early forays into sailing are on a reel that lasts about twenty minutes.  It features a lot of long shots of our GP 14 dinghy sailing away from the corporation slipway in Weymouth harbour, or towards Greenhill beech. There is some classic footage of my brother Adam and Tim Palmer sailing (and capsizing) Stu Barnes' scorpion 1261, Chough.  I think I may have taken that footage from our GP 14 with my older brother Stewart at the helm. 

Those family movies were great and I am lucky enough to still have them, but Dad's obsession with super 8 meant that his stills camera just sat gathering dust, unloved and unused. Until .....well if I'm honest, I cannot remember if I ask to borrow it or if Dad suggesed that I have a go but somehow, I began using it. 

I wanted to take photographs of boats. I remember that. Movies were difficult to use as study aids in those days as freezing a frame was not an option, unless you wanted another melt on your hands, so a good photograph seemed like a good option. 

The selfix is not really a camera for action purposes in the way a Hero might be  today but I did manage to take it afloat several times. Once memorably, during the Weymouth Speed Trials when windsurfing was in its infancy. But that is getting ahead of the story.

The Selfix 820 used  a 120 size roll film and has metal flaps inside the film chamber to allow the photographer to choose between a 2 1/4" square format ( ideal for Instagram in the modern day) which gave twelve exposures per roll of film or 2 1/4" x 3 1/4" rectangular format (better for Facebook but who knew?) which gave only eight. Not having much pocket money in those days, I used the square format exclusively. The great thing about this large film size, is that, by just using a contact printer, it was possible to produce a viewable photograph.

I started taking pictures during the winter of 1976 and my first subjects were of very mundane. Leafless trees or boats wintering in boatyards. I had no idea about composition or perspective. To be honest I just wanted something to develop and print. I wasn't trying to emulate Beken of Cowes or Alistair Black. At that stage it was more about the process than the quality of the final result. In fact it was all fairly hit and, mostly, miss.

Exposure was a total guess without a light meter and so I estimated using the guidelines on the Ilford FP4 film packet.  I think 1/125 sec at F11 worked on a sunny day and  1/125 at F8 if it was cloudy. It was joyously simple and those were just about the only settings I used.

Focusing was more by luck than judgment too as there is no auto focus, or through the lens viewing available on the Selfix, not even a range finder. It was all about estimating the distance between the film plane and the object I was photographing. Then, by using the depth of field based on the dial on the top of the camera, plus a good dollup of 'hoping for the best', I did what I could to get things into focus. It's a wonder that I managed to get any pictures at all! But I did and it taught me a lot about using a completely manual camera.

Looking back it was actually a perfect introduction to photography. 

Apart from his Selfix 820, Dad also had some of his old  developing tank, a contact printer and some ceramic developing trays. So after a quick trip to Kestins, the camera shop in Weymouth, to buy printing paper and chemicas,  I had everything I needed to create photographic masterpieces. 

I set up a very basic darkroom in the coal shed at the back of my parent's house. Basic means it was dark and not much else. I set up Dad's drafting table in there as a workbench and ran an extension lead from the kitchen to give me power for a light. That was all I needed. In those early days, I learned how to load the film into the reels and get them safely into the developing tank in complete darkness. A great challenge particularly if the film jumped out of the slots unnoticed in the dark, because this meant that instead of coiling neatly into the reel, the film was just making its way closer to the floor. Also, during my first attempt at loading a reel, my eyes became acclimatised to the dark after a few minutes and I noticed that I could see light seeping in from around the coal shed door. I wasn't about to start modifying the door so I just turned my back on it to avoid the risk of stray light fogging the film and carried on.  For future attempts I opted to carry out my film development activities at night when it was dark outside.

Once the film was safely in the tank and the lid was on, I turned on the light and followed the advice from the Ilford manual to mix up the developer solution and the fixer and then set to developing my first film. 

My alchemy skills are not very advanced. Harry Potter has nothing to fear from me but fortunately, black and white chemistry is quite forgiving and after twenty minutes or so of inept but hopeful filling, emptying, rinsing, refilling I open the tank to reveal a strip of film which certainly seemed to contain some images. 

Once in the daylight the 120 size negative was large enough to see the image clearly and using Dad's contact printer, a beautifully simple metal box with a light bulb inside and a rudimentary shutter to control the exposure, I was able to make some very acceptable prints. 

During the printing process I used an amber safe light to allowed me to see what I was doing while I put a negative and a piece of photographic paper into the printer. I then exposed the paper by opening the shutter for a prescribed number of elephants. What followed was  my favourite part of the process.  Placing the paper, face up, into a tray of developer and watching the magic happen.

Timing how long to leave the paper in the developer was achieved by counting more elephants and after a surprisingly small number of pachyderms had passed, the image started to form. By rocking the tray gently back and forth, I  made sure that the paper is always covered with fresh developer solution  and then, once the eliphants counting had concluded, I  tried to judge if the image had fully formed or not. Tricky under the weak amber light.  Then the paper was rinsed  in water and placed it into the fixer solution. Fixing makes the photo safe to be view in white light at which point the photographer can turn on the main lights and take in the full splendor of the print. An image of bare tree in my case followed by a J 24 on it's trailer at Ferrybridge. 

Of course, these were not works of fine art. Everything had guessed and estimated.  I had no means of controlling the temperature of my chemicals and working in an old  coal shed was far from the clean environment you might expect for monochrome mastery. Counting elephants is not the most accurate method of time keeping, but to me,  those early prints were great. 

And that was just the beginning. Since then I have bought and sold many cameras and had many adventures including a couple of cameras ruined by saltwater, a few fogged reels of film, an enlarger that packed into a briefcase, I almost burned my parent's house down when I moved the darkroom into the attic and illuminated it by a candle ( shhh, don't tell Mum) and always managed to create some images, nice enough to keep me fascinated in the process. 

To be continued.....