Hilary & A Gray Card At The Manhattan
Monday, November 17, 2014
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| Hilary Waterhouse-Hayward, 6, UBC - Marine Drive 1977 |
One of the toughest
jobs, one that I can do only on my own is to file my photographs and negatives.
Some of them defy filing unless I had an easy to install computer cross-referencing
program.
As an example I found
an envelope that said ferry from Saltspring, Noblex, May 2013. I took these
pictures using my swivel lens panoramic camera which produces very wide images 2¾
x 7 inches in size. I finally decided to file them under an existing folder labelled
BC Ferries. I asked Rosemary, “When I am dead will you know where to look? BC,
or British or ferry?”
All this comes to mind
in the heels of the death of Pat Quinn who had an accelerated heart rhythm like
yours truly and was one year younger that I was.
On a more positive
approach I found a negative sleeve with colour negatives that I took in 1977.
At the time I was attempting to learn how to print colour negatives. In order
to print them, one of the better methods was to have Kodak gray card in one of
the exposures as a reference. The idea was to print that negative and make the
gray in the card gray. Then colours such as flesh tones (always tricky) would
fall into place. The problem with these particular negatives is that the film
stock (colour negative) similar to motion picture film stock is highly unstable
with time. Since these negatives are 37 years old there are shifts in the
different layers of the negative. You might note that in the shadows my 6
year-old daughter Hilary’s limbs are purple. To make them less so I must add
yellow. But if I add yellow… Compounding the problem, the light in the shade of
the Manhattan Apartments on Thurlow and Robson was blue (shade is almost always
blue) or that the light in Stanley
park in the fall was a mixture of green and yellow.
In spite of it all I
like these pictures and here they are for anybody to enjoy.
The Manhattan had yet to be “restored” or “fixed
up”. Inside most of the apartments were in perfect disrepair. And yet I believe
that when the building was indeed renovated some of the additions destroyed its
look. The photographs of Hilary there suffer a bit from the fact that I was, at
the time, fiddling with a new 28mm wide angle.
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| Hilary in Stanley Park |
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| Alexandra, Gaticuchi & Hilary |
