Today a guestblog by our friend Peter Gamba.
Peter (as many others now a days) has a passion for the older/vintage type of photography, and well that fits with what I also like 🙂
But also Peter points out that “knowing” the “old days” can immensely help you in your modern time photography. If find for myself that ever since I picked up film again my photography has grown.

Peter Gamba

My journey began in photography in 1968.  My first camera was a Minolta SRT 101.  I was living in Ecuador at the time.  I was a teenager living with my parents assigned by the U.S. State Department.  I began using color transparencies (Kodak Ektachrome, Kodak Kodachrome).  I had no real knowledge of light and film, nor any access to hand held light meters.   The only way I understood exposure was to take a picture, write down my settings, wait to get the slides back from the developer, then look at the results and read my corresponding notes.  A rather expensive way to learn, in my opinion.   The metering system on the Minolta used a variable needle that reflected the conditions and a static hard circle that the user could manipulate to dissect the needle.  One could then see how aperture and shutter speed worked together, but it wasn’t until one saw the results from the actual photographs that it began to make sense.

Read more

Today a guestblog by one of our regular visitors RikerVP foto.
I think it makes a nice connection with the vintage series you have been reading on the blog the last few weeks, because this is something that happens a lot, in our studio people often bring in negatives/slides/old photos with the question “can you save it?” and luckily often I can, but sometimes it’s way more work than they think.

Zuid Holland Foto Studio – Rikervp Foto Retouching & Repair

A little while ago, I had a gentleman bring me 10 extremely damaged 2.5 x.2.5 cm film negatives. These negatives were so badly damaged from water and mould, white spots with totally missing information. This man asked me to repair the images as best I could as these image were an important piece of history to him. The images you see before you were taken around 1961/2 during the 1961/2 Tour de France and featured the “ASPRO” automobile. Aspro was a well known aspirin manufacture / seller in Europe at that time period.

.
Out of the 10 images I selected 7 images that had a chance of being reconstructed digitally. The other 3 were well beyond repair. Over the span of several weeks I would work perhaps 10 – 18 hours on each image, repairing it in sections, working in sections is vitally important when working on complex images, removing mould digitally, artefacts and in most cases blown out skies and  having to replace them with a natural looking sky . This was agreed to with the owner of the negatives and given the approval to make it so.

.

Working on images like these you could never make a living on as they are so labour intensive and require an extreme amount of patience. If you are to do this and charged an hourly rate to do them.. people could and would not afford to have them done. You either like the work, like the challenge and or like preserving a piece of history. In reality working on images like these.. they do not really pay for themselves.. You just got to have a love of  doing them.
Read more