A bad week for ..

I've been drowning in a cess-pool of negativity this week! I had the cancellation of a photo-shoot for an actor's head shots (They got a big phone bill and needed to pay that above anything else!) - I was turned down for a Wedding because I was too expensive (£200 more than the bride wanted to pay!) - rejected for a PR job because the company didn't have any budget for the opening of their housing scheme (I quoted £125 for God's sake!) and I was offered the princely sum of £40 to shoot every room in a house that was up for sale ("Well, that's how much we pay"). I even had a guy walk into the studio this morning telling me how he used to run not one but three photography studios across the north-west and now he works for a window-fitting company ("Sometimes decisions get made for you" he said) Jeezo! Cheer me up, why don't you!..

One good piece of news was finding out my old Yashicamat 120 camera still works. I had a roll of film developed and scanned during the week and it just made me feel a complete nostalgia for film! Actually, it made me feel nostalgic for the 'good old days' of newspapers too, as one of the shots was of the boarded-up Salford City Reporter office in Eccles. Still, looking back, I think film is the future, and I'm definitely going to try to introduce it back into my Wedding photography!..

Anyway, back to the doom and gloom ...

A new leaf ..

Just a quickie before I head off to North Wales to cover another Schools' Science Challenge, so I thought of 'budding' scientists and 'green shoots of recovery' and all that, and decided to show you a picture I took yesterday. No, not really .. I'd just seen my clematis coming back to life, with the flower heads of last year still sticking their little pom-pom heads into the wind, and decided to dig out my old 50mm 1.2 lens for a play. I found it whilst I was searching for one of my old cameras, the Nikon FM2, 'cos there's something in me that's turning back to film! I was chatting to a young lad in the photo department of my local Asda store, and he was telling me they've realised their processing machine can develop 120 film. I immediately rushed home, grabbed my old Yashicamat, ordered 5 rolls of Provia off the 'net, and hit the streets to start shooting in that new 'old' way I've not done for ages. Now I'm dusting down that Nikon and a fixed 24mm lens, and cannot wait to start working on new projects. Maybe the sap is rising, after all!

Stop press! About an hour after I wrote this morning's blog, I went over to Asda with a roll of 120 for them to develop. Er, guess what .. they don't dev medium format film! Seems the chap I was talking to had taken it upon himself to put some 120 through the machine, and just thought he'd offer me the service! Damn! That would have been soooo convenient!