All posts tagged: black and white

Travel: Hampi, Karnataka, India

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What a place! If your ‘gob is not well and truly smacked‘ by this place then you have no soul. The natural landscape is strewn with huge granite boulders, some piled precariously atop one another, some say, they have been there for thousands of millions of years, formed by the ancient tectonic plate movements of the earth’s crust. It’s certainly a landscape which dwarfs the visitor, not only in scale but in time. It’s also been a natural quarry for the indigenous people for many centuries. Working with the hard crystalline granite – not an easy task I’m sure – artisans and artists first quarried the stone by splitting boulders – you can see evidence of this all around. Boulders with pockets chiseled in line litter the area. It’s said these pockets were filled with balsa wood which was soaked with water. The expansion of the wood split the stone. The boulders were then worked to produce exquisite objects, some huge in themselves, and elements for building construction. There is much to see in Hampi but, for …

A photographic colour outfit from Boots C1950's

When colour meant paint it yourself.

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At a recent auction, I bid on and won an auction lot which included old cameras and assorted junk.  I like these sort of lots so long as it doesn’t cost too much. You never know what’s going to be included in the junk, especially if you bid online. One of the surprises in the lot was  a ‘Photographic Colour Outfit’ supplied by Boots, a large chain of chemists here in the UK. Way back when they were also suppliers of developing and printing facilities and all things photographic for the amateur photographer. The idea was to take a finished black and white print and add colour to it by painting it yourself with a mixture of this range of 9 colours. I’m sure you will have seen some of these hand coloured prints in your own family albums. Some looking like garish cartoons and others more delicately worked with a fine hand. We forget just how recent it was that colour arrived, at least here in the UK. Since publishing this article John Meehan pointed …