Shooting From the Past

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Towards the end of May 2020, I wrote a short piece about my finding a couple of rolls-worth of 35mm negs I shot in 1978, whilst still at college, taken at a chain and anchor manufacturers in Cradley Heath. Well, a while back, I bought a cheap slide/neg scanner from Lidl - as you do - and today for some random reason, decided to give it a go. I duly dug out my negative files to find out exactly what was in them. First off, starting at the back with the most recent, I discovered some photos I just don't remember taking, from the early years of the long-gone AADW chapel [blog posts passim] in Bethesda, which was a nice find in itself. I then turned my attention to some street and pub photography I did at around the same time: some of which I will return to at some point: I also intend to start doing some pukka silver halide and chemical prints of these in due course.

Encouraged by what I found, I decided to scan up the foundry pics from Cradley - one such featured above - and was pleasantly surprised by some of the results, these forty-five years later; showing as they do a lost world that some might have imagined gone with the turn of the twentieth century, but which, in fact survived almost into the 1980s, hand-forging and steam tools as common then as a hundred years before. Victorian engineering still in evidence in the latter part of the last century. Try and find the like now, outside of India. I intend to post the half-dozen key images online at some point, but more importantly, I will start to produce like pukka prints, as soon as I can get my darkroom built: hopefully this spring/summer. Keep you posted...

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