Nigel Hargreaves
I’m pretty sure I got my first camera when I was about 7 in my home town of Taunton, having already experimented with pinhole cameras which I made, and used “POP” daylight paper.
Then my dad bought me a Voigtlander Bessa bellows camera with 120 format and I developed the films using a dark bag, printing them, again, with POP paper which gives a sepia tone.
Before long, when I went to Taunton senior school, I joined the school camera club which gave me the use of a darkroom.
Then I was able to experiment with orthochromatic and panchromatic film, some of it high ISO – 3,000 which could be pushed to 6,000. I particularly liked very hard lustre paper.
You can’t get anything like that sort of thing with digital.
bath full of washing ones when she wanted to use it.
Thank goodness she didn’t really mind.
Back then I had an enlarger which I also made, and started experimenting with colour using both the additive and subtractive methods.
By then, I was using largely slide film, and liked Agfacolour for its vivid greens (which might be why judges keep telling me my greens are too bright).
I still have all those slides that were taken in the mid-1960s.
In 1994, after not having a camera for some 10 years, I was lent an Olympus Pen F half frame camera and regained the “bug”.
I bought a Minolta 35 mm camera and got shooting again, now largely using Fuji negative film and sending to a processing house.
I then bought my first Minolta digital camera in 2000, and have bought that brand, which later became Sony, ever since.
I also nowadays have an Epson A3 printer,but I fear it is getting aged (like me) and I doubt if I will replace it.
So I have recently started using Paul Williams again to print my work.
I have been Editor of the club’s magazine (now also sadly deceased – the magazine, not me), and Treasurer, and have been a committee member on and off since nineteen hundred and frozen to death.