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glort
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20 Odd years ago I built a 2nd office in the back of my shed by partitioning a section of it off from the workshop. It became the store house for old files, prints, album storage and general things that I wanted to keep but not clutter up the main office with. We did used to do a lot of album assembly and order fulfillment up there as I put in a lot of benches to allow for that allow for that as well as enough fluro lighting to put a sunny day to shame.
Time has flown by and finally I am going through it all cleaning up a lot that should have been thrown out long ago. I know I have got rid of a lot already, but not nearly enough.
I went though one large filing cabinet and a cupboard and through out almost 2 240L wheelie bins full of prints and negs. Thousands of prints, hundreds of rolls of film. I squashed them in teh bins and packed them in tight and they were plenty heavy to move. There were 2 Good size boxes I filled with negs of different things from weddings I knew I got great pics with, awesome glam shoots and I pretty much kept all the Trannies from my commercial work.
Many go on how digital images are better than film.
They're not.
The colour and vibrancy in those trannies is simply amazing and sends my head spinning through a time warp back to those days. Still nothing like looking at a medium format trannie though a Loupe on a light box.... except the few 5x4" trannies I found of a furniture manufacturer I used to shoot for.
I looked at ( and kept) wedding prints that had such rich, warm and captivating colour tone unlike any digital Image I have ever seen. The black and whites I processed so many of actually shocked me to look back on and I thought to myself, " They ARE Fking good no matter how old they are or what standard you judge them by" B/W was a big feature in both my wedding and glam shoots then.
I found sooooo many rolls of film I had never used. Boxes and boxes of Kodachrome, Velvia, and even some bulk rolls of T-max ( a film I hated till I got used to it but got all I wanted for nothing when working for Kodak) and FP-4 along with a couple of bulk loads of Colour neg film still unopened and with the price still on it. Even found my old well worn ( out) bulk loader and empty 35mm cassettes. I did at one stage have a medium size Chest freezer packed full of film and bought hundreds of rolls a month had a standing order with a lab for 200 rolls of 35 neg.
What was really telling and I had forgotten about, was a diary from exactly 20 years ago, 1997.
I don't remember things well these days but I had well forgot how busy I was then. Virtually every single day bar a couple of weeks marked "Holidays" I was seeing people. I even picked up a wedding that year on Holidays. Put an ad in the local paper looking for models in the area and had a girl ring that as getting married the next day and her shooter had pulled out. Did the job and it was an upmarket affair which I did really well out of. Paid for out holiday and more!
Back then I had appointments 7 days, day and many more at night. EVERY weekend bar a few I had a wedding or 2 or if not a glam or portrait shoot.
Even though I can't remember so much now. I was reading through the entry's and thinking " I remember them" and I could get a clear mental picture of the couple and things about the day like the venue, weather, bitchy MOB etc in my head.
Recounting the past always gets accused of Gilding over the good old days but I had it right in front of me of just how busy I was. I would have said '95 was a huge year but clearly I was not exactly sitting round in '97 either!
As all the paper work was together, I also came across a heap of receipt books and bank statements from the same time. Yeah, now I know how I bought and paid for this place in 3 years flat.
Scary part is, If I was making that same money today I'd think I was doing well. Sad reflection on things I spose. By the same token, those statements also showed the difference in expenses.
Processing and printing bills at 2 labs was over $2k a month. Advertising ran about the same and the albums and pages I bought also was significant expenses. 'Bout the cheapest thing and probably best value was my secretary and the mortgage when I had it. Was cheaper than paying rent on a shop and I certainly did well out of the capital gains over the years in the place.
I did over 70 weddings that year myself and about half as many again were shot by my stringers. Some of them I had forgotten all about as well even though we were quite friendly at the time and saw each other almost ever week.
I wasted a fair bit of time going through all this and reminding myself of how it was when I had long since forgotten and had my mind filled with other things. I kept the diary, a receipt book and some statements to look back on again.
It sure was a different time then.
I also found my glamour " Stats" book. This was a book I wrote down all the details I could about every glam client I shot in an effort to try and target them with my advertising and promotions.
There were over 200 entries in that book. Wasn't just from that year, went from mid '96 to march '98. I'd forgotten how many I did of those too and I remembered a lot less names than I did with
the weddings. Looking at the pics, I wondered how those girls looked now and where life had taken and treated them. A lot of them no doubt have kids that would be close to the age now when I shot them.
Still got a lot more cleaning to go up there. Loads of old albums will hit the bins tomorrow till I soon run out of space and then i'll look at all the cardboard presentation folders I have up there. Quite a few hundred bucks worth sitting round but with the way we went through them back then, it was just a reasonable stock I suppose. Haven't used any in years so had to justify keeping them OTOH if I throw them out I'll have a job come up in a month and have to go buy more.
After that I'll dig my way through all the old gear like old flash heads , an EP-2 film processor, Dev tanks, Reflectors, studio stands, my track rail system I might use again and even a set of hotlights which may look really funky as house lighting with a lowering of the bulb wattage.... and probably a substitution of LED instead of incandescent.
I'm not interested in doing weddings like I did and could never pull anything like that number in these days anyway. wouldn't really want to with the margins many see to be working on now.
I'll pick up what weddings I can from the glamours whom are the same main demographic. I do want to have a go at the glams again to prove what I did then was no fluke or " the good old days" and also to prove to myself I can still do it and know what I'm doing with my old fashioned and out of date approaches as many would call them.
Some things are very different now but some are so much exactly the same.
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| Jul 17, 2017 at 07:53 AM |
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