Digging up the past

A few months ago while poking through my parents attic my husband came across this camera.  This brought so many memories back for me!  When I left secondary school at 17, almost 18 I had wanted to do architecture.  I got through the interview and had been given the grades I needed to get in my exams to be accepted.  At 17 concentration wasn’t my strong point (I’m somewhat better now!) and I missed by 1 grade.  Here in Ireland it’s very common for teenagers to repeat their ‘leaving’ (Leaving Certificate Exam) but I just refused to do it.  The idea of going back and doing the whole year again was more than I could handle.  So I found a one year Art Foundation course and spent my year doing that instead.  It was an amazing year, I was introduced to so many areas of art that I would never have experimented with otherwise.  I made giant sculptures, paper and textile sculptures, spent 8 hour straight drawing a draped sheet with a pencil (and not finishing it) and discovered my love of textiles.  This camera brought back memories of days on end spent in the dark room.  Anyone 10-15 years younger than me will never have experienced this, the surreal quality of hours in the dark, with chemical smells wafting up while you wait to discover if you’ve created a masterpiece.  No one could ever find you in there so you’d just skip days of classes with a good excuses of a photography contest coming up!

I wonder if this still works?  Think there may be a roll of film in my future (Does anyone know if you can still get film developed in Ireland?)

Have you found any object recently that threw you back to your past with vivid long forgotten memories?

6 thoughts on “Digging up the past

  1. Funny, my husband bought the exact same camera the year we were married. Just seeing your picture brought back all the memories of him snapping photos of family and travels!

  2. I spent a lot of time in darkrooms in my college years! A photographer frined of mine tole me that Lomo.com is great for developing film, you get the prints and they give you a digital copy too.

  3. OMG — my favorite camera in the world — I still use mine! ENJOY! and thanks for the flash back!

  4. My dad was a professional photographer in Oklahoma City. His darkroom was our garage and I remember sitting in the dark or with a red light watching him slip the paper from one enameled tray to another. The smell and the damp chill and the hard little box that was my seat all take me right back!

  5. That photo just hit me with memories! I purchased the same one for myself to study photography post grad. I learned so much about looking at things in different ways, and of course the smell of the chemicals came right back too. I loved that OM1! (yes, still have it-my son even used it in his own photo class in school)

  6. Hi Carol, you probably already know the answer to this, but yes you can still get film processed here in Ireland. My local chemist is a Fuji printer which is just fantastic. Better yet, they give the option of adding your prints to disc at a fraction of the price of developing onto photo paper. This gives you the option of putting the awful ones into the recycle bin rather than having to pay for them first! It’s a great shame that my local photographer want decent enough to offer this option. He’s lost a customer as a result!

    Best of all the chemist will also order in professional spotted
    film, ie ISO 1,200 for your gymnastic competitions – having been there myself, I got fed up with the series of dismembered body parts that my compact digital camera was able to snap…

    Hope this somewhat belated comment proves to be useful.

Comments are closed.