snapsthoughts

Gallery

Are you sitting comfortably - Leica IIf 1956

snapsthoughts gallery (or click on the photo)

From the home page...

Welcome to my photo gallery/dump...

What is this?

This gallery is a collection of photos from 1981 onwards taken with vintage cameras dating from the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s and 1980s as well as several more modern digital cameras. I am (slowly) reviewing my archive and uploading them. The gallery is growing incrementally as I get the time.

From 2008 I used film cameras (medium format mainly plus 35mm) almost exclusively (almost but not quite) for three years for personal photography and learned to develop my own films. Much of that journey is on this site. With mixed success. Luckily the criteria for inclusion is all mine so sometimes the bar is low. Lo-fi photography alert

Photos taken post 2016 are digital. I tend to use a Ricoh GRIII most of the time, supplemented with a Fujifilm X100v. I'm waiting for my film mojo to return.

I've tried to use tags/keywords to overcome the 'broad hierarchy of albums' imposed by the site structure so photos from the same camera can be seen together (e.g. Leica IIf). Likewise type of film (e.g. B+W) and format (e.g. 6x6). Sadly, I don't have access to the make of film or the dev process I used - although I sort of standardised on FP4, HP5 stand developed in Rodinal (or modern substitute).

The tagging/keywords methodology is a bit crude and I have possibly missed tags but you get the idea I hope. They can be found in the menus above.

Most of the photos I have left with their original post-processing since that is how I felt at the time. With some, the current me shudders at the gauche or enthusiastic over-use of effects and filters and I simply had to post post-process... The majority are as they were when originally posted though, for better or for worse. I live and learn and as I grow older one thing I've learned is that less is often more.

For raw and post processing the original me mainly used Bibble or Lightzone and GIMP on Linux, and when I had to use Windows, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. I use Linux exclusively now so Darktable is my main squeeze with some work done in GIMP.

Darktable and GIMP are incredible Free and Open Source Software projects. Compare to the extortion currently practised by Adobe which holds your process hostage if you fail to pay the subscription to Lightroom & Photoshop (really not unlike ransomware, but corporate). But that is a discussion for another place.

Update January 2024 - I just found out that LightZone is still being developed as an opensource project. For its convoluted history see the Wikipedia entry. I'm really happy with this and have downloaded and compiled the 5.0 beta. Even better, it opens the files saved pre 2009 with all edits intact.

This site is a <cough>work in progress</cough> (lulz from a web dev).

All the work here is personal. I've not included commissioned/paid work

These photos also feed my blog with images. But I neglect the blog.

Equipment used:

Film cameras

Films

Developers

Digital cameras

Scanners

For more information my old site deptfordvisions.com can be found on The Wayback Machine and with some diligence and some digging (2009-2013) you can match the images with the development and film used. Personally I find it overwhelmingly difficult and I have a vested interest. Oh for atoms over bits. How I wished I'd kept a notebook not a blog (very sad face). Do not mix my old site up with the Deptford, New Jersey, home improvement site which inherited the url and the name later on.