A 52 week photo project interspersed with photos from the past 40 years.
Also known as Yellow Iris and Water Flag.
One from the archives, taken in Cheshire in the mid 1980s. I was playing around with a high speed transparency film, Scotchchrome 1000. I picked it for its pronounced grain and pastel colours, at times adding soft focus or diffusion filters.
I was trying to get an editor or publisher interested in the work. No one was interested at the time although some of the photos have proved popular over the years.
Throwback Thursday brings another photo with a variety of throwbacks.
The subject is a British post box photographed in Cheshire, England in the mid 1980s. I used to look out for interesting post boxes and classic red British telephone boxes to photograph. In those days editors were often looking for images of red post and telephone boxes so it was useful to have some interesting ones on file.
It was the casual, chalked warning of Wet Paint that first caught my eye. Nowadays there may be Caution Tape surrounding it to keep people away from the wet paint. The red paint on the utility pole amused me.
Also notable is the GR cast into the door. That means that the post box is from the reign of King George V which dates it from 1910 to 1936. Which means it was at least 50 years old when I took the photo.
In the early 1980s I was running the photo department at a scientific research establishment. This involved a wide variety photo techniques to record a range of subjects.
However, polarized light photomicroscopy wasn’t used for anything work related. Having seen the results of other people I decided to investigate the technique. In those days that meant researching in literature rather than simply Googling as you would these days.
Now I will admit that I am writing this from memory, I have googled the subject and what I have found matches my memories of the technique.
I applied drops of a Sodium Thiosulfate solution to some microscope slides and left the solution to evaporate so that crystals would form.
I mounted a polarizing filter between the light source of the microscope and the slide stage. Once the Sodium Thiosulfate had crystallized I put one of the microscope slides on the stage and put a second polarizing filter above the slide. When you rotated one of the polarizing filters the colour of the crystals changed.
The first photo shows what I found to be a fairly typical example of the crystals.
This photo shows small patches of colour against a mostly dark background. I’m guessing that this is a result of the orientation of the polarizing filters.
Competitive ploughing at the Cheshire Ploughing Match in the 1980s.
The Daily Post one word prompt is Crank.
Hoarfrost on Privet leaves.
A monochrome shot from the 1980s when you had to decide which camera to grab, the one loaded with Kodachrome or the one loaded with black and white film.
Between film and digital I have photographed hundreds of species of birds but there’s something about the European Robin. Confiding and sometimes so tame you have to be careful not to step on them, some are real characters.
Beloved weekly photo challenge. The photo below is a film shot from the 1980s that I came across in my slide files recently.
