Strongman and my first reel of film

Strongman and my first reel of film
Originally uploaded by tomreid

I have been inspired by my sister to check out a Flickr group called Flashback Friday. You have to load a pre-1985 photo of yourself based on a certain theme every Friday. As I scanned 99% ish of my photos before I left the UK, I have many old photos easily accessible.

Photos's interest me - but the stories behind photos fascinate me even more - so here is the story I posted on Flickr:

I just love this photo. This is me at the age of 10 and a half in the summer of 1977. This photo was taken from the first reel of film I ever took. I spent the happiest days of my childhood spending long summer holidays with my Gran in Forfar (a little town near Dundee in Scotland). My Gran had given me a camera, she had got it free somehow, through some special offer or other, around 10 years previously. I still have it somewhere, it was sooo basic. It used 127 film (remember that) which took square photos. My Gran bought me a film and paid for the processing from Boots in Forfar East High Street. The film only had 12 exposures and I remember thinking long and hard before I pressed the button each time - this whole taking photos business seemed VERY expensive! I think about that these days when I continually click away with my digital cameras, what a contrast.

This is the only photo of the 12 exposures that I didn't take myself. My Gran took this one, at the bottom of the Boyle park in Forfar - oddly enough she would move to sheltered housing a few minutes walk from here around 11 years later. The T shirt is my "Strongman" T shirt. I would wear it to Physical Education at school - particularly the year previously, when we lived in Inverness. I think there was a certain irony involved in the purchase of this t shirt - I'm now blanking on who bought me it, but it seems to fit with my mother's sense of humour. I was always a complete disaster at PE and games at school and a strongman - I never was going to be. I remember having great laughs with my friends at school in Inverness with this T shirt.

When I had finished taking all of my 12 exposures of my first reel of film, and got them back from Forfar Boots, I remember being too excited to see them, opening them all on the bus, and dropping the lot on the floor. In those days people could smoke on the buses, and they'd use the floor as an ash tray, so all the photos got covered in fag ash - yuk.

I lost all my pre 1985 photos in 1985. I took my photo albums to my first student flat and left them there and never remembered to get them back. Fortunately I kept the negatives and, after a long search to find a negative scanner that could handle 127 negatives (most negative scanners have slots that are molded to handle 35mm only), I spent many happy hours in early 2002 seeing pictures that I hadn't seen since 1985 slowly emerge on the computer screen. I think I scanned the first reel of film I ever took first, it seemed kind of fitting. I was pretty surprised that the quality seemed to good. As well as the negatives surviving well for 25 years, the photos this funny little cheap 127 camera took were really quite good. My Gran thought you should only use the camera in the Sun, so the photos give the impression that summer was very sunny. The subject matter is sometimes funny. As I had to think so much before I took a photo, as they were expensive, and I only had 12, why did I take so many photos of the front and back of my Grans house?

Anyway this set of 12 photos is significant in so many ways. The birth of my interest in photography (I just noticed I have 9000 photos in my iPhoto), but most importantly, it's a little bit of time travel back to the golden days of my childhood, just before the horrors of High School, in 1978, and the onset of adolescence in 1980. The days of strawberry rolls with sugar on the top (the strawberries picked from my Grans own garden), coffee mornings with my Gran and her sisters, black and white TV and Jimmy Young on the radio. But the fondest memories are about spending summers with my favorite person - my Gran. Eleanor Allan Grieve, 1911 -1995, she's gone now, but lives on in my heart every day.