Negatives

My old blogging buddy, Ian at "Shooting Parrots", wondered how my Christmas scanner would cope with colour negatives. I know that one or two other visitors are interested in scanning old slides and negatives. So I dipped into my old shoebox - stuffed full with negatives from long ago. I felt angry at my younger self for not labelling the packs but to be fair that guy never anticipated that one day we'd be able to buy little scanners like my newest little friend. So for Ian and others, here's our two children posing mischievously for daddy about sixteen years ago - created from a colour negative:-

And here's O'Brian's Tower near the village of Doolin in West Clare, Ireland. I took this picture back in the summer of 1985:-

What I am finding is that some negatives have deteriorated a little more than others so that colour is not as true as you might hope. However some of those colour issues can easily be addressed with the editing facilities available both with the scanner and in Picasa or HP ImageZone.

I could quite easily spend the next week scanning my negatives but there's one particular negative I'd really like to unearth - it's of a young woman called Michaela. In the early nineties I was her form tutor in secondary school. I photographed her when I went to visit her at her work experience placement - a hairdressing salon in Hillsborough. She was a sparkly girl and I liked her.

I taught her older sister and her younger brother. Little did I know that less than ten years later she'd be a prostitute plying her trade in Sheffield's red light area. On Bonfire Night, 2001, as rockets cascaded in the sky, she was cruelly murdered by a bad man who, to this day, remains at large.