MTB CULTURE
LOST IN TIME
A few rolls of lost camera film bring back memories of older times.
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS
The fading art of the analogue photograph was always a wonder to me. I can remember watching, amazed, as my first black and white print appeared before my eyes in the college darkroom. Then, a few years later, I would regularly get ‘photographer’s angst’ as I waited for my exposed films to come back from the developers to see how many of my 36 shots yielded useable results, if any. The slide film we used in pre-digital magazine work was particularly hard to work with, meaning that every shot was taken with care. None of the ‘spray and pray’ photography possible with modern digital cameras.
So, when a recent house move turned up a half-dozen film canisters, each with an exposed film inside, I was moved to send them off to be developed, just to see if those carefully curated shots were still etched onto those strips of light-sensitive film. I wasn’t hopeful, because I couldn’t remember when they were from, and film doesn’t really like being left in the can for what could have been, must have been, over a decade. I hadn’t shot film since digital cameras got ‘good’ in the mid-2000s, so who knew when these films were from?
The big reveal
Some 60 quid and a couple of weeks later, I got my slides back. I’d not paid extra to get them mounted, as I didn’t have high hopes for them, but I had got them scanned onto disc. A couple of rolls were in good shape; they were from the Singlespeed World Champs in Stockholm in 2006 – vivid colours, familiar faces and, within the constraints of a 35mm rangefinder camera, pretty sharp.