Heather (and Sarah)

I was going through some old boxes and folders recently and stumbled upon a 10x8" black and yellow box. The smell and feel of opening up a big yellow Kodak box is one thing that digital will never match. Especially when it contains a load of prints that had slipped from memory.These particular prints stood out for immediate scanning (mainly because Heather and I joked about old photos a while back ;o)
It's even more surprising that my early processing and printing has stood the test of time and I'm still happy with them. These are from a few years ago now, shot in the tiny kitchen of a shared flat in Islington as we got ready for a Saturday night out.

This is the full contact print, and, as you can see from my scribbles, I only printed up a few of the shots of the 36 shots. The 8x10 prints actually scanned quite well and only needed a few minor tweaks to contrast and sharpness to improve the quality on screen.

For the technical details, these were shot with a Pentax ME Super on Ilford SFX, developed and printed on multigrade paper by hand. I scanned them in colour to keep the warmth of the paper and gave them a little tweak for Levels and Sharpness in CS4. Also, now that I've got digital versions of these images I can try a few more severe edits. To keep a slight relation with traditional film/print post-processing I thought I'd see what they'd look like solarized (mouseover for before/after)...

It doesn't work for all of them but I'd be interested to hear what people think.
Heather and Sarah permitting, I think I'll have to dig the negs out and do a head to head comparison on print v's neg scan so there may be more of these to come...