from England - 1989 (Wanna see some slides?)

Those of you old enough may remember that.
The meal dishes cleared, the coffee out. 
The host says 'Come and see my (vacation) slides!'

I can hear the groans back over the 40 + years...

Close friends know I'm still not over this. At least now I tend to just leave the computer set on a rotation, in the background corner (mainly, ok?).
Photography was the on consistent class I undertook during my 4 years at art school. I used to purchase black and white film in bulk, and wind my own cans. Developing chemicals were available in the film lab at no cost. We did have to purchase our photo paper. As a result I have thousands of negatives, maybe a dozen prints mounted and saved.
Colour Slides?
A few from first year OCA - which would be 1975.
Got serious on colour in 1976. Almost exclusively as slides.
Switched to Digital in 2008.*

the Horror...
On a fast guess - there must easily be 5000 slides. 

In terms of 'art' shots, my objective has always been to attempt 'one good out of five'. Sometimes I managed this (but there is a lot more junk than good image making).
As I got interested in History, I took increasingly large numbers of reference images. Bets are off on that stuff. I count at least 500 images just from specific museum collections. The trip to England referenced in the title here saw me shoot 20 rolls of 20 exposures (about 375 retained images).

So - that all being said :

Here are a few images from the 1989 'all museums' trip to London, York and Dublin. This set from the Yorkshire County Museum (roughly a block from the more famous Coppergate site.)
(by the way - I am going to be kind, and keep the images to the ongoing theme of Viking Age / Blacksmithing.) **

Yorkshire Museum - Roman period

Interesting because of the cut location. Possible strike from the right side, or more likely as a second blow in a series, the first a typical head shot blocked by the shield, the killing blow from a flip of the wrist, returning the sword across the head (left to right) just as the shield was lowered. (??)
(I can't remember if the damage to the right face was weapon or after deposit.)

Yorkshire Museum - Viking Age leather shoe

One of the features of the archaeology of York is the long occupation of the site (at least to Roman times). The occupation is along the river - so the excavations go down to waterlogged soil. This has permitted the excellent preservation of many organic materials; wood, leather, even textiles.

Yorkshire County Museum - Celtic Iron Age cast bronze mounts

What amazed me here was the D shaped mount to the lower left in this image. I had seen a virtually identical mount in the British Museum - only rendered in gold. Given the similarity in colour of the bronze mount seen here, is this a 'lower end' copy? (You can just imagine the artisan saying 'Look - just like the one the King has...')

More to come...


* I was pretty much forced into Digital.
My much loved, trusty, and almost industructible Yashica TL Electro, became unusable. The camera was fine. I could no longer find the battery required to run the light meter (despite frantic on line searches). Coupled with Kodak stopping making the Ectacrome 400 slide film (or almost anyone else). In Canada, only Carmen's Photo was still even processing slide film at that point. 

** Through this series, I will be generally posting the 'raw scans':
- From original 35 mm colour slides 
- Given the age of many of these, there may show excessive dust / scratching / etc
- Scanned using Epson C370 flatbed photo scanner
- Output image is at 150 dpi at 6 x 4 inch size
- The only correction has been to rotate as needed (unless noted)