1988 Lookback #1 Rydal Water.
This is Rydal Water in the English Lake District.
The image is quite special to me. I took it 37 years ago, in November 1988 on a photography day trip to the lakes. It was that day that switched me on to the absolute beauty of the Lake District. I was using my first SLR, an Olympus OM10 and my favourite film of the time Ilford FP4.
In those days I was bombing around in my Ford Fiesta XR2, no sat nav or Google map and from a camera perspective, manual focus, manual wind on, a max of 36 images to a roll and all at the same ISO.
It’s one of 3 really good images I got on the same roll in the foggy November conditions. I found an old print of the scene recently which prompted me to scan the original. The negative appears fairly thin but actually, a good amount of detail has been picked up.
Im not a retouching expert but ive employed the tools I know in Adobe to make the best of the image after cloning out hundreds of dust marks and scratches. I would have loved to create a brighter image but I felt like I was compromising the mid tones too much and the grain is heavier than I would have liked. Nevertheless I feel the digital 2025 version is an improvement on the 1988 print which needed some dodging and burning.
1988 Lookback #1 Rydal Water.
This is Rydal Water in the English Lake District.
The image is quite special to me. I took it 37 years ago, in November 1988 on a photography day trip to the lakes. It was that day that switched me on to the absolute beauty of the Lake District. I was using my first SLR, an Olympus OM10 and my favourite film of the time Ilford FP4.
In those days I was bombing around in my Ford Fiesta XR2, no sat nav or Google map and from a camera perspective, manual focus, manual wind on, a max of 36 images to a roll and all at the same ISO.
It’s one of 3 really good images I got on the same roll in the foggy November conditions. I found an old print of the scene recently which prompted me to scan the original. The negative appears fairly thin but actually, a good amount of detail has been picked up.
Im not a retouching expert but ive employed the tools I know in Adobe to make the best of the image after cloning out hundreds of dust marks and scratches. I would have loved to create a brighter image but I felt like I was compromising the mid tones too much and the grain is heavier than I would have liked. Nevertheless I feel the digital 2025 version is an improvement on the 1988 print which needed some dodging and burning.