Port-la-Nouvelle II

Port-la-Nouvelle
Yashica Mat 124G
Kodak Ektachrome EPP

Port-la-Nouvelle I

Port-la-Nouvelle

Yashica Mat 124G
Kodak Ektachrome EPP

Beziers, Ektachrome Plus

Yashica Mat 124
Kodak Ektachrome Plus

"The price is right; the cost of one admission is your mind". So sang Dorothy Moskowitz on The United States of America's classic 1968 psychedelic masterpiece The American Metaphysical Circus:

When I went to France I took along a couple of rolls of Kodak Ektachrome Plus, which expired back in February 2005 but had been preserved in a fridge. The negatives had a slight purple cast, but Photoshop easily corrected that.

Ektachrome Plus was part of the the last-but-one generation of Ektachrome. It was more properly known as EPP, and was launched in 1985 as the high-saturation twin of EPN, which was the standard daylight version of Ektachrome. Kodak used a bewildering range of three-letter codes to describe their film, summarised on their website here (PDF), and also here, here:

	Speed	Use
EPN	100	Daylight
EPP	100	Daylight, Extra Saturation
EPR	64	Daylight
EPX	64	Daylight (Warmer)
EPZ	100	Daylight (Warmer)
EPD	200	Daylight
EPL	400	Daylight
EPH	1600	Daylight
EPT	160	Tungsten (artificial light)
EPY	64	Tungsten
EPJ	320	Tungsten
EIR	200 (E6)	Infrared
HCS	N/A	Lith*

* Lithographic film has ultra-high contrast, and is designed for graphics and text, although it can also be used pictorially. It was popular in the film and advertising world to make mock-computer graphics, notably during the computer-world sequences in the film Tron.

By modern standards EPP's saturation is nothing special, although I admit I only shot it on dull days. I like non-sequiturs, and I'll tell you why; it's because they all came from different toy ranges. That's why Soundwave was bigger than Starscream despite the fact that Soundwave was a Walkman and Starscream was an F-15. And talking about fridges, am I the only person that mentally associates fridges with Jenny Agutter?

Why, you ask? Because of that bit in Logan's Run where Jenny Agutter and Michael York are trapped in a frozen cave by a robot, and Agutter changes out of a bedraggled futuristic dress into some furs. That's why. It had a powerful impression on me when I was young. Whenever I get something from the fridge, I think of Jenny Agutter wearing that dress. I like my fridge.

Seldom have I willed for someone's clothes to billow up as I willed Jenny Agutter's clothes to billow up, and sometimes dreams come true. Quite often in Jenny Agutter's case, if you've ever seen Walkabout. And Equus. An American Werewolf in London. China 9, Liberty 37. She's still going, you know, most recently in surprise BBC Sunday evening hit Call the Midwife, and has a small role in the forthcoming Avengers movie. I'd be good on the radio, wouldn't I? You're not allowed to stop talking on the radio, you have to keep going, and I can do that.

Avengers. Diana Rigg. Sorry, I appear to have distracted myself. You see, growing up in the countryside there weren't any attractive women. The only attractive women were on television; distant, unreal. Let's talk about Ektachrome. EPP's time in the sun ended in 1996, when Kodak launched Ektachrome E100, which had finer, T-grain emulsion and more vivid colour. Nonetheless EPP remained on sale for several years after that, until it was finally discontinued in 2009. By that time its nearest analogue was Ektachrome E100VS, which was much more saturated. Here's a day-of-the-dead skeleton figure of Marilyn Monroe, if I stop talking the spiders will crawl to the top of my head and close over me and then I'll be finished.

Why did EPP remain on sale for so long? Perhaps Kodak made a huge batch of the stuff, and couldn't get rid of it; perhaps there were commercial photographers who had their EPP workflow down pat, and didn't want to change. I have no idea. After EPP was discontinued the remaining flavours of Ektachrome remained on sale for three years, but by then all the commercial photographers and most other photographers had switched to digital, so in early 2012 Kodak stopped producing slide film altogether. And here's MC Hellshit and DJ Carhouse performing "I'm EEP", which isn't about Kodak EPP but it's great fun nonetheless.

And so if you want EPP nowadays, you'll have to look on eBay. The last rolls will have expired by now. As a consequence the film is a popular subject for cross-processing, because what have you go to lose?

Ektachrome itself was developed in the 1940s, as an alternative to Kodakchrome that was easier to develop. Throughout most of its life it was faster than Kodachrome, and was popular with the Big Three - NASA, the National Geographic, and Playboy. Particularly NASA. Ed White floating in space? Ektachrome. Ed White's arse floating in space? Ektachrome. I won't link to that one, it would be disrespectful, although White had nothing to be ashamed of. AS11-40-5903? Ektachrome.

You know AS11-40-5903. No, it's not that one. That's AS17-148-22727. It's the other one, this one, Buzz Aldrin on the moon, reading a checklist on his left wrist. Kodachrome got all the boo-hoos when it was discontinued, but Ektachrome captured the most famous images of all. Since ever. Of them all.

You know, there was a time when people might have imagined that the Blue Marble would fade from the memory, because space travel would be so common that no-one would think it exceptional to see the whole Earth from space. Back then, the progression from the biplane to the supersonic jet to the moon was a straight line, heading out beyond Earth orbit, taking us with it. At some point the line became dotted, and then it was a curve. Physics and money. Perhaps when we've solved all our problems on Earth we can go back.

All shot with a Yashica Mat 124G in Beziers, France, using Ektachrome Plus that expired in 2005. Same roll; of the three I didn't use one was crap and the other one was tilted a bit, and not quite as good. See what I mean about strike rate? I got nine good shots of eight different things, instead of 250 decent shots of eight different things.

Fabulous Sheep is a local band, by the way. Obviously the authorities don't want anybody playing with balloons 'cause they'll pop up in the trees there and frighten people.

Perpignan Provia

Perpignan
Yashica Mat 124G
Fuji Provia 100F

"From the ice age", sang Morrissey of The Smiths, "to the dole age, there is but one concern". Whilst in France I took a lot of film with me, and had a bit of a film-off. Kodak Ektar, some old expired Ektachrome Plus, some new Ektachrome 100VS, some Fuji Provia slide film, Pro 400 negative film, even a couple of rolls of Velvia. Here's some Provia.

Provia is Fuji's conventional slide film. It has a straightforward colour palette, neither purple nor green nor yellow, and of course Photoshop can work wonders with it. Point it at grey concrete, as I seem to have done, and you get the colour of weakened sunlight. As far as I can tell, Provia is Latin for for the road, or something like that. People called Roger they go the road. Overall it's a bit boring. No, perhaps a better word is transparent. It gets out of the way, rather than stamping its personality all over an image.

Underexpose it a bit and you get nice colour saturation, generally without Velvia's purple skies (they go deep blue instead):

Perpignan itself has a university, which probably explains the graffiti. It has an attractive central boulevard with a river, which is a five-minute walk from the train station. The town doesn't really have many tourist attractions - the castle in the centre, and the cathedral, which was being renovated when I was there - but it's very attract-ive, despite being surrounded by giant roads.

 
It's only a few miles from the Spanish border, and didn't feel very French (there's much less dogshit on the pavements, for example).

I didn't fall in love with anyone there.

it'll get you like a case of anthrax
and that's something I don't want to catch

Kodak Ektar 100

Yashica Mat 124

Kodak Ektar 100
+ the sun

I'm off to France tomorrow, Beziers, in the south, just along the coast from Catalonia. I'm going to take my Yashica Mat, because women love twin-lens reflexes and France is famous for its women. But, just in case the weather is nice, I decided to make sure it works, and that my lightmeter works, that I work, that everything works. Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.

I used Kodak Ektar 100, a negative film that's made out of gold, and the drums start off backwards. It came... I mean it's not literally made out of gold. It's made out of silver. But somebody's bound to write in and say eww, I think you'll find film's made out of silver. I'm quoting from Jimi bloody Hendrix's Are you Bloody Experienced, heaven's sake. Some boring narrow-minded man is - always a man - is bound to say eww, you made a mistake there. Oh go away.

Ektar was launched back in 2008 and is probably going to be Kodak's last ever negative film. It will be replaced by silence. At the moment Kodak also sells Portra, which has a lighter palette aimed at portrait photographers. Who tend to shoot digital nowadays.

NB this was shot with Fuji Provia - a slide film -if I recall correctly

What's it like? Internet wisdom has it that Ektar is very contrasty and saturated, and it's supposed to be "scannable" - there's almost no grain - and so it's easy to digitally massage the colours. I've kept the images pretty much as my lowly Epson V500 chucked them out. Judging by this interesting article I might have erred slightly on the side of underexposure. In days gone by conventional wisdom had it that you should underexpose slide film by a tad to get extra saturation, and overexpose negative film, but judging by the examples in that article Ektar turns into a cartoon when overexposed.

In comparison the next two shots were taken at the same time with Fuji Provia 100F, which to my eyes has a slight greeny-bluey tint. I used the same metering:

Bear in mind that the roll of Provia expired back in 2007. It's from the same packet as the cross-processed shots in the previous post, but developed normally. Back to Ektar:

Kodak has used the Ektar name before, for different things. There was a range of Ektar films in the late 1980s, early 1990s, with speeds from ISO 25 up to ISO 1000. Very obscure nowadays. Before that, many years ago, the name was used for Kodak's top-quality large format lenses, and is apparently an anagram of Eastman Kodak TessAR. Tessar is a type of lens, see, and it's also an anagram of stares, which are what you get when you take your trousers off in public. There will come a time, if it has not already come, when these names are worth more than Kodak's physical products.

Ektar won the 2009 TIPA Award for best film; surprisingly the TIPA people still have an award for best film, which was won last year by Portra 160. Given that new film doesn't come out very often, I surmise they'll retire the award at some point.

Could I have got these colours with a digital camera and Photoshop, carefully processed with an appropriate colour profile? Probably. With the right actions, the right workflow it would have been less faff that sending off film to be developed, and then scanning it. But, dammit, I'm not a robot, Jim. I'm a human being. With feelings! I sweat, and I have hair. I shake my fist at the robot men and shout I.

So, Kodak Ektar. An anagram of raket and krate. Next stop: France.

Cross-Processing Fuji Provia 100F

A while back I got hold of some old Fuji Provia 100F that expired in June 2007. The very month that Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. A long time ago. Provia is Fuji's general-purpose slide film for normal everyday photographers rather than landscape photographers. Given that it was cheap and out-of-date, I decided to cross-process it. And write about it, in the style of John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, with a guest appearance from the single best line in J G Ballard's High-Rise. Cheap and out of date.

I'LL GIVE HIM FIREWORKS
"Cross-processing", said the fisherman, "is a... it's a technique, really, where you take one lot and do it with the other lot." Film, he was talking about film. The warehouses were bloated with film, bloated like the ruined corpse of a fish. The look of surprise on their fishy faces. They shouldn't have been surprised. There was no demand.

"The cats take slide film", he gestured to the glass, "and they take it these days. Just take it. Shoot, they can't give it away. They do them with the wrong chemicals, man. Not that there are any right chemicals, dig?" Or the other way around, thought Luger. Negative film, positive. Minus to plus. "Look, I'll show you", and the fisherman fished in his pocket:

Three films. The old films. There was normal slide film, with the colours. It was like looking into a dream, from before the air was too thick to see through. There was negative film. Black and white. And there was negative film again, but it wasn't right. It was colour, but backwards. The orange mask had gone. He could see a telephone box, grass. Probably real. It looked to be an expensive neighbourhood. Another mortar round struck, a few blocks away. It didn't matter any more.

"It passes the time", said the fisherman.

ROTTING IS NATU-
I don't mind if I'm fat, thought Jill as she sat eating the dog. As long as they're fat too.

FLASH...cross-processing is another one of those "instant art" things, that makes the horrible dreary reality of real-life seem exciting and new. Which is what photography is all about. It's all about making real-life look like a photograph. People don't take photographs because they love real life. They take photographs because they hate real life.

Green, Provia goes green. They knew about it. But there was money to be made. It goes green. It looks normal, but green. You can do that in Photoshop. Green.

Brigadier Neale pondered the report. The detonator had malfunctioned. Of the two bodies, one was a collection of bone shards and some burned scraps of hair and something that resembled an overdone sausage. The other was a former Captain in the Scots Guards. The pumping plant was ruined. The government would have to find another solution for the drought problem. That was not his problem.

The telephone rang. The Forth Bridge. Are they mad? he thought. How do they expect to live without... all the things that England... culture and so forth. The BBC? Financial services, that's it. How will they live without England's financial services? Never start a war unless you can take the pain. That was the first lesson of warfare. Never start a war etc. The bloody Forth Bridge? Good job they had the first, second, and third bridges, what? But, seriously.

THE BEE INDEX
The electric heroin-haze of the clean death simplified her thoughts. It. Green. As her mind drifted she imagined the green, and the other green.

WORSE THAN ANIMALS

She dreamed of a future where the fleas and lice were infested with people. Their turn to suffer, she thought. Don't give them a second chance. I will not go i will not go i and she went

... and with a swooshing sound reality returned. With the right processing the results look, well, normal. The Sheep Look Up is fascinating today. John Brunner had a knack for picking topics and issues that still resonate. The book was published in 1972, before I was born. Doctor Who had only just gone colour. It's about the end of America by plague and pestilence and fire, brought on by poor behaviour of the organisations that make the guns and butter and guns.

It's the quintessential turn-of-the-70s enviro-panic apocalypto sci-fi novel, right there with Make Room, Make Room and Brunner's earlier Stand on Zanzibar. Robert Silverberg's The World Inside; J G Ballard's High-Rise; John Wagner's Judge Dredd. Future Shock, The Limits to Growth, etc. An alien relic for people my age, who grew up during the 1980s, the anti-70s.

Up is written in a freeform style, daddy-o, that hasn't aged very well but at least he tried, dammit. God damn at least he tried.

"Are your children okay, Mrs. Mason?" the girl asked.

"Doug says they will be in a few days."

"What is it, this - this epidemic?" Pete inquired. "I had a touch of it myself last week. Which made for-uh-problems." A self-conscious grin. "I don't get around too fast right now, you see."

Doug smiled, but it was forced. Dropping into an armchair, he said "Oh... basically it's an abnormal strain of E. coli. A bug that ordinarily lives in the bowel quite happily. But the strains vary from place to place, and some get altered by exposure to antibiotics and so forth, and that's why you get diarrhoea. It's the same really as turismo, or as they call it in England 'Delhi belly.' You always adjust to the new strain, though. Sooner or later."

...

Pete nodded. "But why is there so much of it right now? It's all over the country, according to the news this morning."

"Somebody told me it was being spread deliberately," Jeannie ventured.

"Oh, really!" Doug snorted and sipped his drink. "You don't have to invent enemy agents to explain it, for heaven's sake! I'm no public health expert, but I imagine it's a simple vicious circle process. You know we're at the limit of our water resources, don't you?"

"No need to tell me," Denise sighed. "We have a don't-drink notice in force right now. Matter of fact, I suspect that's why the kids caught this bug. They're so proud of being able to go to the sink and help themselves to a glass of water... Sorry, go on."

"Well, figure it yourself. With eight or ten million people-"

"Eight or ten million?" Philip burst out.

"So they say, and we can't have hit the peak yet. Well, obviously, with that many people flushing the pan ten, fifteen, twenty times a day, we're using far more water than usual, and at least half this country is supplied with water that's already been used."

He spread his hands. "So there you are. Vicious circle. It'll probably drag on all summer."

E Coli, antibiotic resistance, water shortages, 1972. They never really went away, unlike e.g. space elevators and mankind's dream of space travel. That died. Bugs and decay survived. On one level the whole thing reads like the ravings of a Big Pharma-hating blogger, and of course none of it came true, and in my mental picture of the storyline all the characters have sideburns and flared jeans, and are huge fans of The Band and the MC5. Hippies, in other words, of the original variety. They probably had a lot of sex though.

Although not good sex, at least not in The Sheep Look Up, because everybody catches something from something, with mouth-filling pus-filled sores and so forth, and then it gets really bad. At one point a rich man's son is kidnapped by environmental ne'er-do-wells, and forced to just live in an ordinary person's home for a while, before being released. They don't mistreat him, they just force him to live like a normal person.

"He has hepatitis. Acute. He's running a high fever, about one-oh-one point eight. Also he has violent diarrhea, enteritis or dysentery I imagine, though I'll have to wait for a stool culture on that. Those are the most important things."

"What about the rest?"

It was an order. The doctor sighed and licked his lips. "Well... a skin complaint. Minor. Impetigo. It's endemic in the slums around here. One of his eyes is a bit inflamed, probably conjunctivitis. That's endemic, too. And his tongue is patched and swollen-looks like moniliasis. Fungus complaint. What they call thrush. And of course he had body-lice and fleas."

The mask of Roland Bamberley's self-possession cracked like a strained ice-floe. "Lice?" he rasped. "Fleas?"

The doctor looked at him with a sour twist of his mouth. "Sure. It'd have been a miracle if he'd escaped them. About thirty per cent of the buildings in the city center are infested. They're immune to insecticides, even the illegal ones. I imagine the enteritis and hepatitis will turn out to be resistant to antibiotics, too. They usually are nowadays."

Bamberley's cheeks were gray. "Anything else?" he said. In the tight voice of a man looking for an excuse to pick a fight, wanting to be needled one more time so he can let go his charge of ill-temper.

The doctor hesitated.

"Come on, out with it!" Like a coarse file against hardwood.

"Very well. He also has gonorrhea, very advanced, and if he has that he's virtually bound to have NSU, and if he has those then he most likely has syphilis. Though that'll have to wait for the Wassermann."

Characterisation? Not much. It's more of an assault than a book, and it's a shame Brunner couldn't have turned it into some kind of multi-media presentation, a kind of illustrated novel combining words and sounds and pictures and so forth. As a conventional film it might possibly work, but it would lose most of the novel's style, and the fractured narrative would be jarring. It's supposed to be jarring, but you can take your time when you're reading. Brunner was not a film-etic writer, unlike for example Michael Crichton.

Is it a good book? It's a memorable book. It must have knocked their socks off in 1972, and in fact it was nominated for a Nebula Award the next year. It lost to Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, but that's awards for you. Despite apparently going out of print and never selling in great quantities it was the kind of novel that appealed to budding novelists, along with Brunner's previous book, Stand on Zanzibar. Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which won the Nebula Award in 2010, is based on an uncannily similar set of themes (plus genetic engineering, which doesn't feature in Sheep).

Several of the book's elements seem extraordinarily prescient, although Brunner largely achieves this by throwing in everything. Apart from e coli, and mention of antibiotic-resistant bacteria - the idea being that antibiotics used to rear chickens end up diluted in human food, allowing bugs to get used to them in their weakened state - it also has acid rain, two years before an influential scientific paper that made acid rain one of the biggest environmental causes of the 1980s. Remember acid rain? It's still around, you know, but nowadays it's old hat.

Part of the book's narrative concerns a plot by the US agri-pharma-military complex to stir up trouble abroad by sending out tainted relief supplies, which is the kind of thing that still excites conspiracy theorists today, although the notion that this might happen from incompetence and petty greed seems more plausible, and indeed Sheep suffers from a central paradox, whereby the Machiavellian super-state seems to be deliberately making things worse for itself.

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME
But... it's really a set of descriptions of horrible events, with people. The people are nothing, really. They have names and say things, but they aren't what the book is about. There's a pattern whereby a bunch of characters that we don't care about discuss the horrible events that are unfolding, and then they are killed. The relentless grimness becomes hard to take seriously, because it's so unsubtle it feels almost like parody at times. The characters keep calling each other baby, and they talk about the fuzz, and the pigs, the man, and meeting cats and getting high, etc, which roots the book in a certain time and place. I mean, dude hasn't aged too badly. But man, cat, etc, no.

The bitty, jumpy narrative would have worked much better in small doses, for effect. We learn surprisingly little about the hero, Austin Train, a kind of unwilling underground messiah figure who seems overwhelmed by the movement that has sprung up around him. If the book had followed him - Fight Club style - it would have worked better. Instead we get an impressionistic mesh of narrative strands. Train's movement never feels plausible, something the book shares with Illuminatus!, which it otherwise crushes like a bug.

Overall the book feels like a passionate, sincere statement that's a bit too large for Brunner's grasp. It's vivid, all right. Sticks with you. I'm glad it exists. And some of the writing is incredibly sharp:

"The office," a mere hut of planks and clay, had been one of the many headquarters of the invaders' district commander. Fighting had continued at Noshri a week after the official armistice. Right across one wall was stitched the line of holes left by a salvo of fifty-caliber machine-gun slugs. Opposite, the corresponding line of marks had two gaps in it where the slugs had been stopped before they crossed the little room. Lucy tried not to look in that direction, because she had had to tend the obstacles.

Yashica Mat, all of them. I mean, if I concentrated on one thing, I might achieve something. But the wheels are spinning too fast. So I skip from thing to thing, like a fly, trapped in a slaughterhouse.

Meta II

While the world slowly dies I have been making music again, so stop, collaborate, and listen, to my brand new invention:



It's 160bpm and very loud, and also very good, because I go crazy when I hear a cymbal, and a hi-hat with a souped up tempo. That widget again, in case your browser doesn't render it properly:

Meta II by Ashley Pomeroy

And because this is a multi-media blog, here are some previews of things I have been up to. First, some Fuji Provia 100F run through a Yashica Mat, and cross-processed:

And a couple of shots taken with a Zeiss Nettar 515/2, an old folding camera that shoots 6x9cm negatives. Almost the same model as this one, but older, with slower speeds. Kodak T-Max 100 that expired in 1997:

It doesn't have a lightmeter or a rangefinder or nuffin, but it is nice and sharp at f/16. And with ISO 100 film, at 1/100, that should be a good exposure for bright sunshine. But there isn't much bright sunshine in England in March, so I've had to dig out my lightmeter. More on this presently.

Cheerio, Ektachrome

 
Yashica Mat / Kodak Ektachrome 100VS

A while back I had a look at Kodak Ektachrome, and liked what I saw; but all good things come to an end - even Lou Reed's Live: Take No Prisoners - and Kodak have recently announced that they are discontinuing their range of slide films. The whole lot, including Elite Chrome, which was aimed at the consumer market. Farewell then to standard Ektachrome 100G, and Ektachrome 100VS, its "vivid saturation" twin. I barely knew ye. Take No Prisoners was the one with the speed-induced free association ranting. Look, someone transcribed it, back in 2000. Not very well, but they got the flavour of it.

See, the band starts a song, and Lou Reed does the first line, and then he gets distracted by the noises inside his head, "they're sittin' there by the fire man, it's an electric fire, you plug it in, I like make believe fire, I like make believe love, too, ooh mama, gimme some make believe love - hey, make believe love, that's an album title Michael, write that down quick...", and this goes on for an hour and forty minutes! Walk on the Wild Side is seventeen minutes long and he doesn't even finish the first verse. It's brilliant. "Watch me turn into Lou Reed before your very eyes."

Mamiya C33 / Kodak Ektachrome EPP

Still, enough about Lou Reed. The headline image was shot with 100VS - you can tell - using a Yashica Mat 124G. 100VS wasn't aimed at portrait photographers, although with Photoshop's colour correction I didn't have a problem with it. As for 100G, I liked the relatively restrained, gritty look, although like so many other people I didn't shoot enough to bond with it because Fuji's slide films were cheaper. That's the trick. Never get too close, because it won't last. Never get too close to something expensive, either, because it'll take you down with it.

Yeah, and Metal Machine Music isn't just feedback, there are noises. I mean, apart from the noises. There are other noises.

There Are Other Noises, that's an album title. I'd better write that down before I forget. The other images were shot with a 35mm camera, a Canon EOS 100, using a Sigma 15-30mm, at the Tate Modern. Ektachrome 100G.

No doubt the few newspapers that cover this news will talk about the death of slide film, although Fuji still makes Velvia, and Provia, at least. I'm not sure about Sensia and Astia, however. The company has a page for Astia, but it's not listed in their directory of slide films, and although Sensia was apparently discontinued in 2010, it was discontinued again in late 2011. The company also makes, or made, Trebi and Fortia E6 film for the far eastern market. Or made. Or not. And as far as I know the only other slide film made in the entire world is Agfa Precisa, which may or may not etc.

Mamiya RB67 / Kodak Ektachrome 100VS

What's the difference between Fuji's films? Well, Velvia 50 is very contrasty and vivid, Velvia 100F is toned down a bit, Provia and Sensia are toned down even more, and are apparently the exact same thing, made to slightly different tolerances, and Astia isn't or wasn't. And that's Fuji's slide film range. I'm listening to Take No Prisoners as I write this, it'll be interesting to see what effect it has on my writing. In my mind, New York is a grainy black and white photo of a... it's the cover shot of The Ramones' debut album, but with snow.

There was a time when amateur photographers liked to bore party guests by showing off the slides they shot on their trip to India, or In-jah. Nowadays no-one projects slides. The same kind of people do the same kind of thing with blogs instead, or by forcing their victims to scroll through the pictures on their iPod.

Slide film was once the mark of the professional, because it was less grainy than negative film, contrastier, and in a professional workflow it was easier to check the results. Scanning and digital cameras have essentially nullified these advantages, and E6 slide processing has been in decline for several years. No doubt it will one day go the way of all flesh. The way of all emulsion. Until then, there's something special about holding slide film up to the window to look at the results. It's like looking at a computer screen, but analogue.