Following on from the news I got the other day, I dug out my old negative archive. I have a new archive, also of negatives and mainly colour, but revisiting 35mm Black & White I have noticed how frugal I was in making images when we were saving for a deposit to buy a house. In particular, I revisited my circumnavigation of Great Britain archive to find quite a parsimony of content and a slightly damaged set of images. the damp came from damp storage between house moves . The sparsity came from limited resources at the time plus when on patrol, there are day jobs to do and my camera was normally stowed in my bunk.

During our brief respite in Stornaway prior to the romp off Cape Wrath to Orkney a few of us explored the island. Several things still stand out for me. One was seeing a whalebone arch on the West coast, another was seeing bundles of tweed at the end of lanes that were collected just like milk churns would have been say in Wales in those days and the third, because it makes a frequent outing is a vase that I bought the new Mrs O from the most North Westerly tip of the island from a Yorkshire potter. The potter was delightful serving us teas and cakes and scones. We all bought something.

Anyway here is an image of the whale bone arch at Bragar. Look it up on Google Maps and see it in street view. The house has changed a little.

Someone was in. Note the smoke from the stack.

Now note the smoke from our stacks a few days later whilst in Stromness. How we hated the engineers cleaning those stacks by injecting diesel in the upper parts of the exhaust to de-carbonise them. Filthy great gobs of black greasy soot all over our newly washed decks!

We sailed in the evening before having ridden the 30 foot swell following that run of Westerly 10s and the Old Man of Hoy was a glorious sight in the setting sun. The next morning though saw the first snows of winter and Scapa Flow in a horizontal blizzard was something else as we boarded and searched oil tankers. The empty beer barrels were not ours although I believe we might have emptied a few the night before!

Now, I can recall much of the scenery and places we made safe harbour in despite the lack of a celluloid record. I regret not making more images as it was a once in a lifetime opportunity but then they would not mean much to anyone other than my crew mates.

Compare that parsimony with yesterday morning. I gleefully got out before dawn and fired off a roll of 120 as part of my extended Edgelands series. When I first started making images, one roll of B&W was treated with great reverence. I could have shot less yesterday but the sky was perfect so I experimented with some bracketing. I never ever did this back in 1979 as I had no light meter so I gauged my exposures by eye. I can see now though that my early days of careful film usage works well with my mindset for my current large format exploits. I have not exposed a single slice of film this winter as all the good days so far saw me up a ladder making good repaired woodwork on the house..

How glad am I now that got on and painted whilst I could.