Two years ago my sister had a summer party, there wasn't much parking space outside her small cottage and what space there was taken up by a magnificent Buick Wildcat, all 18' of it! I lost no time finding the owner amongst the guests. Andy seemed quite unperturbed by my desire to photograph his car. The detailed explanation of my photographic methods, the use of medium format film and my love of cars, in general, was probably unnecessary as he agreed to meet up the next Sunday.
The following weekend during Andy's lunch break we met at the industrial estate where he worked. I didn't want to use all of his free time so I shot my roll of Ektar 100 fast. My final frame was a portrait of Andy in the driver's seat as he left. For me, this photo has a special significance, back then I sent my films to a lab for processing and scanning. One thing that had bugged me though was that often scans which came back from the lab were terrible. Being new to hybrid film/digital workflow I was never certain if it was bad scanning or my own camera work. In fact, it was that portrait of Andy which was the final straw, it came back from the lab as a totally unusable scan. Because I could see it's potential I inevitably felt compelled to finally purchase my own film scanner and learn to scan myself. I could not believe the difference between the lab scans and my own first effort, without any experience I managed a decent improvement; one that certainly left me with no regrets over my recent hardware purchase.
Two years later and quite a bit of scanning later too I have finally embarked on my redux project, that of scanning all of my old lab scanned negatives to see if I can extract any other presentable images. I started with Andy and the Buick Wildcat and if there is one thing I know now for sure is that "If you want something done properly, it's probably worth trying yourself"
