The future is retro ..

And so now, ladies and gentlemen .. hot on the heels of my new Joy Division website comes .. my new Smiths website! Don't worry, I don't plan to launch any more websites any time soon!
I think ..

I received an email on Monday from one of 'my brides' from 2006. She wants to order some prints from her Big Day, and what a surprise I got to see that, as recently as nine years ago, I was still shooting on film! There they are, all her lovely poses and group shots, all on 6x6 Provia 400H negative! If she orders one of those it'll mean a trip to the lab like the old days 'cos, despite my nice words about our lovely postmen yesterday, I never did trust my Wedding photographs to the mail! ..

Of course, she was delighted to hear that I still have all her photographs, but that's my thing! I never throw any of my work away! Did you read about the 'Black Hole' warnings in the 'paper over the weekend? A chap was saying that, in the future, there'll be a massive gap in our records of the past. Everything digital will be, he says .. gone .. mainly because technology will have moved on and we won't be able to 'read' any of our digital heritage. Speaking as someone so retro I still play cassettes, watch videos and print from negatives I think I should be ok!
Hey, good idea for a website! ..  

Just a boy...

Portrait of the artist! A dip into the archive for a shot I've found of me, me me...  This was taken when I was staff at the Warrington Guardian, 30 years ago. I'm busy filing negatives and writing captions, with my trust Nikon FM on the desk in front of me! As you can see, the company spent a fortune on our luxuious office space!! I had to smile when I saw the photographs on the wall. They're of Wendy Wu, who was the lead singer in one of my favourite bands, the ever-so appropriately named Photos! Oh, Wendy, where are you now? It's hard to imagine now but I'll bet that, on that roll of 36 negatives on the table, there are probably 5 or 6 jobs, half-a-dozen frames shot at each event. Did you hear that? All you people who say the good thing about digital is you can just keep shooting until you get a good shot!!
Grrrr.....