grandmother – IJM Photography

WordPress, like most companies, wants to create wealth, especially for WordPress. One way it does that is to create advertising that it will place on the sites that allow it. IE you go on a page and every time that you click on the ad, the advertiser gets people to its page and pays WordPress for this privilege. I’m not into advertisements on websites, and like some old-timer surfer, believe that they are a mighty pox that should be eradicated, like world poverty, and poorly made cups of tea.

But I digress. That last paragraph has nothing to do with death, I hear you say, and you know what, Dear Reader, you’d be right! But I promise I will get back to death, but back to ads first. WordPress has decided that they want to sell ad space. Nothing has changed since the newspapers, apparently. Ads to pay the ink and the journalist that writes the articles. If, however, the articles in the newspaper are dismally awful, then you might not want to read the newspaper in question, and therefore WordPress wants you to “create content” that is interesting or meaningful.

They have found a sneaky way of doing this. The buggers! On my dashboard for this site, yes that one that people seem to keep reading despite me writing everything, WordPress gives you subject hints about what to write about. Some were about what would happen if you won the lottery, another about describing your first computer, and then I saw this one. How does death change your perspective?

Soooo, let’s see what we write about death. It’s like those essay titles you used to get at school in English, French, or German, etc.

It is, of course, a very loaded question, and it would be easy to play to the clichés about death. As a religious person who is fortunate to have been blessed with a certain amount of faith and instruction, I know that death is part of life, and with taxes, happens to everyone, at least one day in their lives, usually at the end of their lives of course.

My first experience of death was at primary school, where a classmate’s brother was killed whilst crossing the road. It certainly made me aware of the dangers of crossing the road.

In 1979 my Great Grandmother died. This mother, grandmother, and Great Grandmother was the kind of lady that would wait for the milkman to deliver the milk with his cart and horse and pounce on the horse poop with a dustpan and brush to use the poop on her roses. Apparently, it was a savage competition. All this for a bucket of shit!

At the age of 13, my grandfather died. I was with my grandmother who had just lost her husband. I was crying and there she was comforting me instead of the other way around. With 70 years of age difference, we certainly had a different perspective on death.

In 1987, my uncle died prematurely, and I remember seeing the family walk up the aisle in the church behind the coffin that contained his body crying. In 1989, it was my grandmother’s time to leave this world behind and enter the next world, and it took me six months to cry.

In the last twenty years, I have lost school friends, a cousin, four aunts, two uncles, and a nephew, and when going through depression, I could have been next on the list. Statistically, I am closer to death than my children, but death can come at any time. Now, at 51, I am not afraid of death. I have accepted that this has happened and can happen, and although not something I would wish upon anyone, you know it becomes more and more likely.

It is always saddest for those left behind, and we feel the part of the deceased took in our lives, missing from us, and this missing part hurts like bloody hell. So, if death is inevitable, then how do face it? Some atheists have told me that you live, and then you die and you cease to exist. How can that be? The dead mentioned earlier in this article are still in my heart and therefore must still exist somewhere. As a Catholic, I believe in eternal life, not for my body, but for my soul. That soul lives in my body, but there is no way of identifying it. The soul makes me, me. It is like talking about my spirit. When I die, my body will die, and my soul will be judged by my creator. What happens to my soul will depend on how I spent my life preparing myself for my death. This death that is part of life… If I have rejected my God, then my soul will be separated from Him and will spend eternity in hell separated from God forever. If I have merited heaven but my soul still has the stain of sin on it, then it will be purified in the fires in purgatory, and once cleansed of sin, may enter Heaven, or if I die in a state of grace, then I will enter Heaven directly and spend eternity with my God.

So, does death change my perspective? And if so on what? On my life? On the way I chose to lead my life? Possibly. I will die one day. It will happen. I hope I will be prepared and I pray for those who have died and have gone before me. Some will say that I am delusional for believing in a big guy in the sky and that it ends when you die. The difference between me and that person is that I have hope, faith, and love. And yes, it changes the way I try to lead my life.

Well, that was an interesting exercise, and I might try it again. I hope not to have been morbid or overdone the whole thing, but I have been honest with you. Those who believe, and who accept Catholic doctrine, pray for the souls in purgatory, as they pray for us, even more so when they are delivered into God’s Presence in heaven. It’s good to have people on your side.

I have a friend here who said that I am always contradicting myself and that it isn’t logical and how can I say two things at the same time, and I replied that the two things, although contradictory in appearance, are both as true. That person is a production of French education with philosophy as the subject that all French teenagers go through to learn how to think the way the Education Nationale tells them to think, under the guise of learning all about freethinking and critical thinking. I, however, am a lot less French despite what some people might like to think, and I will think any blooming way I desire, with or without contradictions.

I’m not talking about my mental state, for once, but photography. I love both digital photography and analogic photography. I am bewildered by modern technology and could be classed as a geek, and yet the experience of using old technology that is obsolete for some gets me all excited as a small child waiting for Father Christmas, but being told by their mother to go to bed, otherwise, he won’t come. It didn’t stop me from waking up at the crack of dawn, and I think my parents might have regretted the decision to buy me a guitar for Christmas and hearing me playing at some ungodly hour of the morning. As a 49, fat middle-aged gentleman, I can understand them, but my 6 or 7-year-old self didn’t and couldn’t imagine the disturbance that I had caused them.

Oh, how times change! While I’m on the nostalgia train going to the “good” old days, I have vivid memories of a drawer at my grandparents’ house, where my mother was brought up, and in whose room I would be staying. Inside this drawer, many “old” things just fascinated me. It could be my grandfather’s old plumbing ruler or golf tees. It could be anything but it was an entrance into another world for me. My grandmother’s kitchen, because at that time, my Grandfather wouldn’t be in the kitchen, was a place where everything was from the 1930s and it all just fitted together. There was the Anderson shelter, which had been turned into a proper pantry, was a relic from the Second World War where they would have sheltered from German bombs falling on the town and trying to stop my Great Uncle’s shipyards from operating correctly. My Great Aunt would drive around in an ambulance taking care of casualties. Amazing people from an amazing time.

What does this have to do with photography? Not a huge amount, but is that a problem? Oh yes, it tells you about my fascination for the old and very new. I have “a number” of cameras, the eldest being from the 1940s and the newest from 2021, with nearly every decade being represented in-between the two dates.

So I was going somewhere with all this. Ah yes, lately I seem to be getting back into film again. In the last but one article, you may have seen the photos from the Mamiya, which is a relatively modern camera being from the early ’80s. Well, this time, I’m still using a camera from the 1980s, the Pentax ME Super. For once, I wasn’t using Ilford HP5, which is my “go-to” film. No, I decided to be different and get out of my comfort zone, and use a new film. I say new film, I mean Rollei has been around for donkey’s years, but this was a “new to me” film. May I introduce you to Rollei RPX 100. I never use 100ASA film, but was turned by Fomapan 100, which you can see in the photos from the Hangar à Bananes. A fine-grain film, especially when you compare it to the grain from HP even when shot at box speed, let alone 800ASA or even 1600ASA.

The film was developed in ILFOSIL 3, and I thought it was great. I tried in town and country and was thrilled. The thing that pleased me the most was that it kept flat, which means a lot to somebody who has ever tried to scan film. The last time I bought a film I played wild cards, and it was also a lot cheaper than HP5 which is a very convincing argument. I still dream of Kodak Portra 160, but it is getting more and more scarce, and therefore more expensive. A beginning of the month kind of film. Oh look at that, my pay has just gone in…

So yesterday evening I was scanning a film my son had shot on a 1960s Kodak camera, and thinking about how he has changed since 2016 when I picked up my Fuji XT2, a slightly more modern mirrorless digital camera. I hadn’t used a modern camera in quite a while and it almost felt foreign to me, and yet familiar at the same time. My fingers seemed to find the controls without looking very far, and it felt very natural. Maybe my love of digital and analogue isn’t that contradictory after all?

Now it’s time to show you the results of the Rollei RPX 100. I liked it and am happy I bought more than one roll. The camera, as I think I said earlier, was the Pentax ME Super.