It’s yesteryear once more…

By Silver Blue

Back in the days when I used to shoot 35mm (on my Minolta X-370 because either digital was too expensive or hadn’t been invented yet), I was on the road a lot more than I am today, which in a way, is sad. I think I have a better “eye” for photography these days, and now that I’m exclusively digital (Canon Digital Rebel XTi and Canon Rebel T3i, and 2 point and shoots thrown in for good luck), the price has gone WAY down because I don’t have to purchase film and have it developed … only to find that my photos were crap.

Not every photo I took was bad, however. Some turned out quite well. Take, for example, this storefront window in State College, PA (from 1996):

I don’t recall what store it was (even though there’s a bit of the storefront label on the window int he bottom left), or what they were promoting (other than an obvious throwback to the 50s and 60s), but something about the all in one “original entertainment center” made me wistful for yesteryear. (As a side note, if you look closely, you can see where the TV has been replaced with most likely a CRT computer monitor — the channel selector knob (lower right, under the screen) is missing, and the true TV tube would have filled the hole and pushed out in a convex shape.)

If you’re more into abstract shapes and forms, however, from the same summer, here’s something very simplistic:

Now, I can’t tell you why the broken clothespin (which, in a way, looks like either a bird in flight or a glider) caught my attention, but it did. Revisiting the photo 16 years after it was taken,  I cleaned it and recomposed the photo by performing a crop to “simplify” the photograph and give it balance. In case you’re wondering what the original photo looked like, here it is:

I had to do some restoration to the photo from where the negative was rather scratched and speckled, and to correct a colour shift on the right side of the negative, where it had damage from heat (it was stashed in the attic for a good number of years). I like this photo, but I like the recomposition more. I’ve at least learned that you don’t have to put everything dead center of the frame to take a photo of it.

[audio:https://www.eyesofsilverblue.com/qtap.mp3]

Silver Blue, who wonders how many memories are stashed in people’s shoe boxes, closets, attics, just waiting for their moment to be relived, or in some cases… wondered about because the photographer has passed on…

Published by Silver Blue in 1996, Minolta X-370, Pennsylvania, Pleasant Gap, State College