WR&N Version I: The Slide Collection

Sometime in mid-1973 I had access to a 35mm SLR camera—an old Canon TL (which, incidentally, I still have). It belonged to my parents at the time, but it eventually became mine as they got tired of having to set all of the exposure parameters manually. Me, I loved it.

Anyway, just prior to my pinhole experiments, I took a few shots of the layout with the Canon. Unfortunately, while I understood shutter speeds and f-stops, I did not yet comprehend color temperature, and I used daylight film under tungsten lighting. Worse, it was slow-speed film with a 100-watt desk lamp for illumination, the result being that the aperture was wide open—and so the depth of field was non-existent.

The results are almost not worth publishing; nevertheless, they do have some degree of documentation value. For instance, they reminded me of some of the rolling stock I had back then and subsequently forgotten. And if nothing else, they serve as a window into the past.

Six of the seven surviving slides are reproduced here, enhanced with a modicum of digital darkroom work to make them more aesthetically acceptable—they look much better in monochrome and cropped to varying degrees. Note, however, that I did nothing to alter the modeling. Click on the thumbnails for larger images, plus the raw versions for comparison.

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