FALLING SOMEWHERE AS RAIN

With my interest in vintage and antique images, I have collected a number of glass magic lantern slides over the years, predominately as the fragile decorative squares are interesting curios on their own, but I did entertain the idea of projecting them in a magic lantern projector. I have managed to acquire two homemade devices, neither of which are fully operational and missing parts, so in the interim, I have been trying to get a good capture of the images on the slides themselves. Scanning proved problematic, as the flatbed scanner I borrowed would only run on Windows XP, so I had to resort to a simpler method. By placing the slide against a window on a bright day, I re-photographed it with my phone. Importing it into Photoshop, I straightened the image, and trimmed off the frames. Then I dropped them into Lightroom, to adjust the tonality and spot out a few major blemishes. I could have removed every spot or mark, but a completely pristine image would not have the same sense of age...

Just before Xmas, I found myself back in London for a weekend, staying in Watford, in order to visit the Harry Potter Studios nearby. To make the most of the weekend, we did the usual tourist trip into the city, with a view to visiting some favourite locations and some new ones. As my grandchildren are  big fans of Paddington Bear, it made sense to see where he arrived in England and pick up some souvenirs. The hustle of the station on a wet Saturday evening, meant that camera photography was awkward, although I did see quite a number of expensive cameras in evidence over the weekend. Personally, I opted for my phone and the Fimo app again, with the X-Red film, that I really enjoy. The earlier Hipstamatic app with its hundreds of film/lens combinations came into play in Chinatown, one of the busiest parts of the city. Getting around was problematic, having a four year old in tow and a toddler in a pram, especially on some of the older, deeper Tube stations, with lots of stairs and ...

Since I was able to recognise the sensation as unusual, I have been subject to something which I much later discovered as ‘grapheme-synaesthesia’. Synaethesia is a neurological trait, whereby one sense automatically triggered another involuntary reaction. Grapheme Synaesthesia means that an individual associates colours specifically with letters or numbers, for example the days of the week for me, all have a specific colour associated with them I.e Monday - red, Tuesday - green, Wednesday - air force blue, Thursday - brown, Friday, dark blue, Saturday - pale yellow, Sunday - pale gold. A similar effect occurs with numbers and dates, so as the new year approached, I felt that 2026 would be a bright pillar box red. 2025 by comparison has been a warm chocolate brown, like cocoa powder. Consequently, my recent choices of photographic filter have leaned distinctly into the red, with an emphasis on a phone app called Fimo, using a specific film simulation called X-Red. This emulates the clas...