When I first started blogging in January 2006 I wasn’t too sure of what I was doing or what the purpose of my exercise was. It didn’t take long for me to find my course which was mostly about memory, family, existential angst (and melancholy), gardening, my passion for roses, reading and my lasting relationship with my wife Rosemary (almost 48 years).

In spite of the fact that a few in my family object to some of my many racy photographs of women that I have posted here (suitably cropped so as not to show bits) I have persisted in what for me is as much a passion as my roses.

As we prepare for what most call downsizing (an extremely ugly but accurate verb) I have suffered stress, depression and coming wave of the loss of what has been our house and garden for 30 years.

This particular blog is one that has no existential angst. It is a bit of an interlude of escape . It is all about photography and that curious realization that old school film photography when combined with the digital age (in this case a very good scanner) can be beautiful and in many respects not available to either pure film or digital technology.

What you see here are scans of tiny individual frames from a conventional contact sheet. These individual frames are 30.2mm x 16.7mm. Obviously the level of detail cannot compare to the scan of the actual negative or to the enlargement into, say, 8x10 inches. But there is beauty.

For some of the pictures I used Kodak b+w Infrared Film. The effect on the highlights is called halation.

Virve

 My subjects were the beautiful and very patient Reid sisters, Virve and Julia.

Virve