Adam Tinworth

A photographic method and a career, in the rear view mirror

Portrait of the blogger as a young hack

I've been scanning again. One of my redundancy resolutions has been to use my sudden increase in available free time to catch up on some projects, including the digitisation of my own magatives and old family photos. 

The image to the right comes from a set of negatives I shot as a university student - probably in the spring of 1993, although exact dating is hard. I'm not quite sure who took the photo of me above - but I do know they took it with my camera.

The thing that has really struck me about this film in particular is how darn grainy it is. Honestly, I'm not sure if that's an inherent characteristic of the film - Ilford HP5 Plus - or some poor darkroom discipline on my part, effectively "push processing" shots that didn't need it. 

Or, am I now so used to using digital photography (which I've been doing since late 2001) that I've forgotten how much grain was an inherent quality of silver halide photos? I suspect the coming weeks of scanning will answer that question one way or another.

The other thought that occured to me was that, as these photos from the student magazine office remind me, I'm not involved in the production of a journalistic periodical in any way for the first time since probably 1987. School magazines, student newspapers, my professional journalistic career… It's been over two decades of continuous involvement brought to an abrupt end by redundancy.

And you know what? I'm amazed by how little it's affected me. Perhaps sometime in the last year I passed the point where I'm truly more a blogger - an online content afficicnado - than a journalist.

Where does that take me next?

 

Do you think my RSS reader is trying to tell me something?

Red Eyed and Removed

Today is proving to be a struggle.

It's now about 25 hours since I had any significant amount of sleep. I took the red-eye back from Florida last night, and I'm aiming for at least another 9 hours awake before I finally keel over.  Oh, yes, and I'm in the office - estatesgazette.com's office in Procter Street, to be exact. I'm testing my wife's anti-jet lag theory, that see you doing as much of a working day as you can before retiring to bed. 

It was all neatly planned, you see. My desk in one of RBI's London offices was prepared, with my laptop left, pre-Christmas, securely locked in my under-desk pedestal. The journey from Heathrow to Holborn was smmooth and easy, and I walked into Procter Street before 9am.

And then I was stopped on my way to my desk by someone aking me if he could help me. "Just going to my desk," he said, gesturing in the direction of my long established desk at EG. "That's not your desk," he replied, a puzzled expression on his face. And, to my horror, I saw that my desk and those around it were now set up for developers. My desk was, indeed, gone. And with it, my laptop. 

20 minutes of frantic hunting and pestering allowed my to find most of the stuff that was lost. I found my books on and in one guy's desk. The docking station and power cable for laptop turned up with the IS team. And, finally, the pedestal was found under a random other desk - the laptop safe within.  

The monitor and monitor stand are still AWOL, but I'm not going to stress about those too much. The nature of my work at EG is shifting, and I think that truly hotdesking - just grabbing a free desk when I can - should make that both easier and more productive. 

I've just spent a useful half hour clearing our the junk I'd accumulated up here over the last coupld of years, sending some of it down to my "main" office in Sutton, and the rest to recycling. 

And I'm just hoping that I don't regret the decisions I've made when I'm no longer sleep-deprived....

Maggie Philbin is....

Somewhere, my inner seven year old, a Swap Shop fanatic, is squealing with delight.

(and yes, it's the same one)

Reflux

Oh, God. Advertisers have spotted that I'm middle-aged, haven't they?