2004

2004

There’s an Al Stewart song that begins ‘1959 was a very strange time, a bad year for Labour, a good year for wine’ – and 2004 was a bit of a turning point for me. Up until the end of August and redundancy, I had a full-time and permanent job – something I’ve not had since.



It was also the year that I met a tall, slender and talented lady called Joceline – and very late in the year, I bought my first DSLR, a Sigma SD-9, quite a weird camera. A nominal 3mp, but with the red, green and blue sensor units stacked on top of each other, so that it gave higher quality than you might expect from an equivalent Bayer sensor. And more directly derived from a film camera than most: the viewfinder has the area outside that covered by the sensor greyed out, but it’s just a full-frame device, downgraded.



The turbulence of my work life (at the beginning of September, I started a temporary job at Oxfordshire County Council, so I didn’t have the trauma of a sudden lack of income – but I had all the fallout of having left a job that I’d been good at, and mostly enjoyed) meant that although I still took pictures, I wasn’t necessarily paying them as much attention as I did before, and do now.

Consequently, I’ve just discovered a cache of colour slides of Joceline, shot on at least two occasions during the year, Several grace this blog. Many were on the lovely Agfachrome Professional 100 RSX, the final beautiful development of the gentlest slide film I’ve met. Kodachrome may be as accurate, but it is a little colder: Fuji’s Astia was a decent stab at the sort of palette that Agfa managed so easily.



And looking at the films, I’m aware that my transition from film to digital started very slowly: originally, I took a few digital images among the film pictures, and I was happy to burn through several films in a shoot, even quite a short one. The opposite is now true – though the first all-day arrangement with Joceline, at the Whit weekend, resulted in 27 films for the darkroom. I’ve not matched that since!



In retrospect, I view my best years at Coventry City Council as a sort of Camelot. So much of the time I was surrounded by competent people, doing their jobs properly – and I know that’s something that many people never experience. To be part of an organisation with competent people who also operate as a competent group is a wonderful thing: and it’s one of the reasons I’ve been watching The West Wing with such enjoyment.

But if you think photographic blogs should only be about cameras and photographs, I offer you both of those…