First Light

One of my christmas presents was a new scanner. The important feature I asked for (and got) was negative scanning capability. I have an enormous quantity of black and white negatives from the 1980s. Y'see, when I was at York University, I was the photographic editor on the campus newspaper Vision. I therefore took a metric shedload of pictures of York Uni life in that era. Most of the pictures made it to contact sheets, but only a few made it all the way to prints. Sadly, most of those went off to the printers with the galley pages and I didn't get them back. The galley pages were hand made to begin with: the text was laser printed then cut and pasted (literally: scissors and glue!). Vision bought an Apple Macintosh as my involvement with it was ending, in about 1990.

I was also a keen amateur photographer in the eighties and early nineties, and did lots of B&W photography in my spare time too.

So I have a file full of negatives, with few prints. It takes a long time to do black and white prints - you can lose days in a darkroom. I've been meaning to get a negative scanner for years, and now I have, so I can scan this body of work and see what I've got. There are some things in there I never printed out it will be interesting to see. There are a few obscure rock bands of the eighties I managed to photograph too (who can remember The Little Angels?)

But to start with, I just needed one strip of negatives with one image on I could test it with. A quick flick through found one. Cross referencing it with other pictures on the same strip of film that were printed in Vision, I can tell this picture was taken in the last week of January 1988. IIRC, I took this to be used as an image in his campaign for SU president. Our very own minusbat, with a good deal more hair: