Quote:
Originally Posted by Euan McDonald
Hi Tony, A couple of weeks ago I was in at Power train and on the wall is still the pic of your truck and the sig van.
Who would have thought after 35+ years that pic would still be on the notice board.
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Blimey Euan...if I'd known it was going to grace the halls of commerce for the next 3 decades I would have posed for the camera!
It's quite a good pic though, and I'm very glad Keith kept all his negs from those days, otherwise there'd be no record of this blitz at all. My own stuff went west long ago, when my folks cleared out the house prior to sale when I was gone - although they did hang to Keith's resto album, which surfaced a couple of years ago when my mother died.
Prior to these pics we took a phenomenal amount of B&W photos in our blitz hunting days as kids. We had very little money of course, so we used to ride our pushbikes almost 10 miles to Ringwood camera store to purchase bulk film, in the form of 10 metre rolls of expired stock which was incredibly cheap as I recall. Then we'd retire to the darkroom at home and roll it by hand onto film canisters which we recycled over and over! On top of doing our own processing, this brought the net cost down to perhaps one tenth of commercial price, enabling us to snap away at blitzes with gay abandon! We more or less took the same shots, so the loss of my stuff is no big deal.
Of course, the film rolling was rather tricky - unlike processing where you could use a safelight, it had to be done in absolute darkness - wielding scissors to cut the film into 1 metre strips, which inevitably sprung into tight coils, and little pieces of sticky tape to attach the end to the roll, which inevitably stuck to your fingers instead, then carefully winding it onto the roll without getting fingerprints on the emulsion, and fumbling around in the blackness to find the metal shroud and some caps to press on the ends. As you can imagine, the entire process was accompanied by much cursing and swearing in the dark!
It was a wonderful hobby though, and strange to think it's been completely wiped out by digital cameras. Not that I'd ever want to back to the old way!