217/365 Old family photographs

This afternoon was spent looking through old photographs of my family. I took the boxes of prints and negatives to Roland & Suzanne's - Suzanne had asked if I could look out any photos of Roland growing up. Our Dad was a keen photographer for many years and had a darkroom of his own.

Across the bottom you can see our elder brother Steve, our Mum, Steve again. Across the centre - Rol & Steve with Mum; cousins Cathryn & David, our Mum holding baby Steve on the top of the wall, and Aunty Honey (Ethel) and Uncle Alf (obscured); Aunty Honey holding a turkey (they were farmers). Top image is cousin Cathryn; top right Roland as a toddler and Steve (obscured) with 2 girls whom we think may be Uncle George's daughters, so cousins.

The oldest images were of our parents as babies/toddlers in the early 1930s. As is so often the case, only a few pictures had any info on the reverse, and some that had been in albums had been removed or fallen out and so were separated from their captions.

Our own children will have digital archives with not just dates but the times that images were captured - but still not necessarily names and places!

65/365 Props for talk on Photography

I volunteered to talk about my hobby at Jodie's school. In connection with World Book Day, the children have been talking about hobbies and several parents have come in to talk about theirs. After HB finished talking about coaching a junior football (soccer) team, using a ball, boots and her Coaching Manual to illustrate, I spoke about photography. I talked about how cameras now are commonplace and tiny compared to the first enormous 'keep still for 5 minutes' contraptions; I showed them a magnifying glass to explain that there are several similar lenses inside the lens on the front of my camera along with a miniature computer; I showed a selection of photographs illustrating why we take photos, to capture a time, a place, an event, so that we can remember it later and tell our children and grandchildren about it. And we talked about how photographs are everywhere around us and can be sent all around the world on the internet. I showed them my Mum as a baby, me as a baby and Jodie as a baby, and my wedding day.

With the children sat on the floor in a group at my feet, I took a few pictures of them showing the difference between ambient light and flash, and also zooming in to show a head and shoulders and then the same child's eye in close up - they thought that was cool! I also used the p&s to demonstrate how Jodie likes to take a picture of herself, a "self portrait". They laughed at that! I was able to log on to my flickr account and show my 365s as a slide show, every time Jodie appeared all the kids were pointing and exclaiming! I asked if any of them thought they might want to be a photographer when they grew up and lots of hands shot up.

It was great fun. By the time I left they were in the hall having lunch and lots of them were waving to me as I went through the hall. Jodie likes it when Mummy comes into school. ;0)