Family Album

I am so incredibly excited about these images I have just discovered!

About two years ago I found an old 120 roll film in a box of things my grandfather had given me along with his old cine camera. I researched the film and found that it was an extinct film type that was popular in the 1960s, but no longer existed. Nonetheless I took it to a lab and they processed it for me through black and white chemistry because this is cooler than colour processing and therefore less likely to damage the film. 

I was excited but when I went to collect the film the image were really dark, and only a few shadowy figures were visible on the negatives. The negatives themselves were really brittle and curled up so tightly that it was impossible to fit them into a film holder to scan them. Disheartened I squashed the film between two heavy books in the hope that it might flatten out, and forgot about the whole thing.

Until that is the other day when I rediscovered them all nicely flattened out, and scanned them into the computer. At first the images were so overexposed they looked like a bright turquoise mess, but after adjusting the levels on photoshop these amazing images of my mother and brother and some family friends as children in the late 1960s emerged. The photos are summertime snapshots taken on the beach in the Isles of Scilly where my family have lived since the 1700's.

 

 

The way the film has deteriorated means that the nostalgic element of the images is even stronger.

I absolutely love the effect.

But now I don't know what to do with this very exciting, but also very personal discovery...