This my very first blog post and i’m going to start with a bit of story. Here goes…..
About a year ago I bought some old darkroom kit from an eBay seller in my local area – it cost few quid. It included an easel, a couple of graduates, and some developing tanks. It was all quite dirty (see the picture below) so I set about cleaning it up.
When I opened one of the tanks a small developed roll of film held tight by perished elastic band fell out. It was in a bit of a state. The band had adhered itself to the non-emulsion side of the film roll and it was very dirty.
I cleaned them and managed to coax the remnants of the rubber band off with water, and cotton earbuds. I then rewashed and dried the negatives.
I scanned them and I got some very usable images which I cleaned up in Photoshop (the odd scratch and emulsion loss in the sky). I managed to work out the location with signs etc on the images.
I’ve shared them with a few local group pages for the locality. It was a pit gala held on the local cricket ground and we’ve managed to find relatives of some of the people on there. Based on discussions we’ve managed to pin the date to 1970 – the gala queens sash shows that.
My interest was piqued and the “Forgotten Film Archive” was born.
The full Image Gallery can be found here.
