Clerkenwell Birthday Visit with University Granddaughter

         My birthday was to start fairly early, as the plan for the day was for me to meet up with my elder daughter and one of her twin girls who has just settled into student accommodation having started at University in London.

         My daughter had to take the other twin to work before she could take a train to town, so Poppy and I chatted as she finished getting ready then we all headed for the Tube to Farringdon, where I could show Poppy Clerkenwell where I had spent much of my time as a photographer, with two studios just off Hatton Garden, and also the last employed job before I started ‘SOLUTIONS photographic’ — Longacre Colour Labs, where  I had been their Sales Manager.

         This area of London holds many pleasant memories for me, as I maintained many contacts even after becoming self-employed and return for Clerkenwell Design Week despite all the changes to the area that I first new.

         For many years this area held the workshops for London, and once held numerous photographers and Designers, who moved to either Covent Garden or the less expensive areas of East London around by Old Street and City Road.

         Poppy, despite being here a short time had already acquainted herself with parts I had thought she would not have found; that I had considered known to only a few! I was pleased by that. We took a stroll around the garden of St. John’s Priory, which allowed me to create a montage of Poppy in three windows, to depict ‘See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil, as a small piece of fun. We were greeted by a Friendly Robin and some late roses there before a walk to Clerkenwell Green where Catherine and Poppy found a quirky piece of architecture just by one of my erstwhile clients Design Bridge.

         I was treated to lunch by Catherine and we later headed towards areas familiar to Poppy, and soon we were seeing London heading into evening and Christmas, and as darkness was falling seeing the lights reflected off the Thames, and we spent a short time by the Festival Hall and the skateboarders by the river, and all too soon it was time for Catherine to head for home to pick up Holly from work, and for Poppy to head back to Halls to catch up on her work, and for me to head back to my car back at East Finchley and drive back home, in the knowledge that I had another early start as my other daughter was treating me to a visit to Brooklands Museum.

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Retouching, Research and Guidance

Retouching has held a fascination for me from my earliest days practising photography – I was working for a studio just off Hatton Garden in London, and this was and still is the very heart of London’s Jewellery manufacturing, obviously famous for diamonds in particular.

We worked for various companies producing their catalogues and for my part I was creating compositions of rings and brooches and these were propped up by various means to give depth. At that time our methods were often crude as we were using  plasticine and pins and mainly tungsten lighting creating considerable heat so they could sag or even fall over during the invariably quite long exposures! If we were lucky then it was simply that either the  pin or the plasticine would show, if we were less lucky then it was a reshoot! We invariably worked with 10 x 8in colour transparencies which did give us the opportunity to have them retouched by a local company, Gilchrist; it was a balancing act as we judged whether the additional film and processing was less expensive than retouching. There was also another aspect: There were occasions when it was not possible to avoid nasty reflections of adjacent items, due to how tightly we had to pack them into the composition and I would often have liked to have these treated, but our clients were disinclined to spend the extra.

This desire for higher quality would ultimately bring me to a rival of Gilchrist, Longacre Colour Labs, where within a year of joining them I became their Sales Manager. This in turn would lead me to set up ‘SOLUTIONS photographic’ and by the time the digital era had arrived, I was doing my own retouching using knowledge I had gained from watching the retouchers working with dyes and bleaches and duplicate transparencies. Clients that I had acquired from my earlier photographic work now became clients using digital technology.

Two very interesting things happened this last week, one involving technical guidance which I provided remotely for a client I first met by travelling to his villa in Provence for five days’ training in connection with Photoshop; this time it involved Lightroom and also help with ascertaining why his website was no longer providing pinsharp images from his work. I produced a web gallery of his pictures that both viewed fast and were razor sharp, the other was providing another client who was now producing 1/32 Scale figures for World War One and Two aircraft, the retouching of an aerial and insulators on a Spitfire for his catalogue cover. This was not simply to draw a line between a post behind the cockpit and tailplane – this required research by both of us so that what I added was as authentic as possible for the marque of the modelled Spitfire.

Both clients were pleased with my work, and importantly I enjoyed the challenges involved and will soon be visiting Chichester to provide further help with Lightroom and his backup strategy for the former, possibly next week.