nice bright colors

Do you remember when films shown at the cinema were proudly brought to us in Glorious Technicolor?

What about when Simon and Garfunkel sang to us about Kodachrome:

They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.

And wasn’t there an award-winning TV advert – probably in the 70s – that quoted Christopher Isherwood’s “I am a camera”, with an eye that blinked like a camera shutter to capture each image? I’ve been looking online but can’t find it anywhere. I think it was for Kodak, but I guess it could equally well have been for Olympus, Nikon, Minolta or Pentax, though probably not Polaroid. In fact, it might even have been for the film, not the camera.

Not that it really matters. the point was only that I’ve been thinking more about photography recently, because I’ve started posting pictures on Instagram. And, while it’s a place to post photographs, Instagram isn’t really designed for people who use cameras.

Whereas I’ve always downloaded my pictures to the computer and processed them in Photoshop – mostly cropping them in and sorting out levels, but occasionally doing all sorts of tweaks and retouching without a blind bit of real knowledge about the software I was using – Instagram is set up for images to be posted directly from the phone they are taken on.

Although I’ve forgotten most of what I used to know about F-stops, film speeds and shutter speeds, I do still like to get behind a viewfinder and adjust the focus of a proper camera. But the phone I carry with me at all times is a good camera and takes some stunning pictures.

I think, though, that it has its own colour vision calibration, which isn’t exactly the same as my own eyes. I have cropped these images a fraction, but I haven’t adjusted the colour in any way. The reality of each original scene was glorious, which is why I took the pictures; it just wasn’t quite what I’ve posted here.