Marina Hasselberg

Many years ago when my now 27-year-old granddaughter Rebecca was with me in my car she told me something that I have not forgotten. “Papi why do you hold your hand on the shift lever when you drive if your car, an automatic has no clutch?” I was amazed at her knowledge of car mechanics.

Around 1978 my Rosemary told me, “Alex, you keep complaining about not being able to print colour negatives in your darkroom. I have signed you up this Monday to a colour printing course at Ampro Photo Workshops."

Both of those incidents remind me that we must live in the present but not forget our past. Learning to colour print gave me a knowledge of the colours used in colour printing when one is correcting a print. These are magenta, red, yellow, green, blue and cyan. In this century most photographers press on the auto button for colour correction. Few, if any of them know exactly what the colour cyan is. I do, so I am able to correct well my digital photographs, film slides and colour negatives with my now 20-year-old Photoshop 8. I don’t have to lease it and it provides me with all I need to correct and print my pictures.

What all the above amounts to is my insistence that in this century, melding the techniques and technical advances of that century with the innovations of this century is a good idea.

Few photographers that I know in Vancouver have my Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner. I use it to scan negatives and slides, scan my plants and to print whatever I want in just minutes.

On September 19 I will be one of the photographers projecting slides at the wonderful Gallery881on East Hastings (at that address). I will be using my 6x7cm Linhof slide projector with a Leica lens.

It has been some years since I gave an old-fashioned slide presentation with glass and plastic Gepe slide mounts. I believe that photographers like gunfighters are as good as their last gunfight or photographic shoot. I would like to project new slides. I will be using some Ektachrome in 120 (expensive but available). I have also discovered that I can scan my pictures or download my digital camera pictures and then print them on inkjet transparency film to 6x7cm size. While Dutch Gepe slide mounts are no longer available I found a box of 10!

What you see here is:

A Fuji X-E2 exposure grossly underexposed to get the odd colour and grain-like noise. I then sized my picture and printed it using my Epson P700 printer. The result is the mounted slide scanned.

I am excited at using the technology of two eras.