I've spent some more time looking at my mother's slides and uncovered this gem from 1967. It shows Wood street in swindon, wiltshire. Taken at 4:10 pm, on a rainy afternoon I'm trying to imagine the camera that was used as this is the only one set I've uncovered so far taken on regular 35mm film. This series of 14 images were taken on Agfacolor film. Most of the 14 images appear under-exposed and all now have a strong magenta color cast. Maybe photoshop cs5 will help further improve the recovery of this photo but the originals have not aged particularly well.
The image below is from further down the street and taken a few minutes earlier judging by Deacon's clock.
‘Manfield and Sons' had been a shoe store. I've no idea how long this shop had been empty but, before the end of the year, my father would own the shop and the sign would read ‘George Davis & Son'. Most of the images from inside have not fared particularly well but I do like the one below, taken from the window of what would, several years later, become our kitchen as our family moved into the apartment above the shop. While living there, my brother and I shared the room with the bay window as our bedroom.
This next image was taken from inside the property on the first floor. My mother has labeled this image as being of the kitchen window, looking out to the workrooms of Deacon's the Jeweler. Note the single, cold-water, tap.
We lived above in the apartment above the shop for a few years. We moved in in 1970 when I was 7 and moved out in 1972 when I was 9. It was marginally closer to my school; I no longer had to walk up the hill on Winifred Street. It was also closer to most of my friends, my cub-scout den and my piano teacher. After we moved out my father reconfigured the apartment, making it smaller and more above the front of the shop, reconfiguring most of our former living space to expand the shop below and add an additional showroom and an office.
I cannot imagine the number of snapshots that get destroyed every year – pieces of history lost forever. The advent of digital has only accelerated that destruction as people throw out their images with their computers, fail to refresh the digital format rendering them unreadable on future machines, or cease paying for web hosting and other services where they've saved them. I save my original RAW files out as Adobe DNG files and save my slide scans like these ones out to DNG also. At present, I feel that gives them better longevity and readability than the native CR2 and NEF formats from my cameras and scanner. This also give me the option of going back and re-processing as the software improves, though ultimately I'll be faced with having to re-save these images in some future format if I'm to continue to preserve them.
