MarkW

Evening all - hope your festive seasons have all been good! I have spent a few hours this evening going through a couple of hundred old family photos with my mother. The oldest, by our estimation, is from about 1908, and the most modern ones are from the mid-1960s. Some of these newer ones are on glossy paper and not in bad condition, but the older ones are all on fibre-based paper and in fairly bad shape. My mother only got her hands on them in the early 1990s when her mother died, and it doesn't look as though they had been very well cared for. As part of a little family history project we'd like to digitise them for circulation around the wider family in the hope they can fill in some of the blanks. I know there are some professional photographers on here, so I was looking for some advice on the following: 1. Would you attempt to clean surface dirt off the older photos or leave them alone? 2. If cleaning is OK, what's the safest way to do it? 3. Any scanner recommendations? In addition to the two hundred or so prints (mainly postcard size, but a few up to A4) we also have hundreds of 35 mm slides belonging to my father that we'd like to scan as well. Thanks guys!

I'm 6' 2" and weigh 100 kg. And just before I read this my wife was asking what my New Year Resolutions were going to be. I think that settles it...

My father-in-laws Christmas presents are referred to as 'Facebook fodder' in this house, because he puts so little thought into them that they're only good for comedic purposes. In 2012 he bought a single gift to be shared between me, my wife and our two kids: a box of Family Circle biscuits from Makro. In 2013 he bought the boys a small chocolate penguin each, and nothing for me or Vicki. Last year he bought me a jar of Rowse honey with the 'reduced to clear' label still on it. This year he didn't get any of us anything. Obviously me and Vicki couldn't care less, but I have to admit that not getting anything for your grandchildren at Christmas is something I struggle to get my head round.

I thought of a few more! 10. Westworld 11. Blow-Up 12. Dr Strangelove And on a musical theme: 13. Elvis On Tour 14. Eric Clapton Live '85 (Behind the Sun tour) 15. This is Spinal Tap

OK, so this has been spawned by the Star Wars thread, and is a list of those films that you find yourself going back to again and again. There are some 'classic' films I've watched once and which did absolutely nothing for me (2001: A Space Odyssey being a prime example, closely followed by Brief Encounter), some that I'd rather shoot myself in the testicles than ever have to sit through again (Sister Act, Nuns on the Run, anything with Jim Carrey in), and then a small selection that I'm always happy to sit down with whenever they are on. Off the top of my head, of the 200 or so DVDs on the shelf at home these are the ones I can't imagine throwing out: 1. The Big Lebowski 2. The Third Man 3. The Andromeda Strain 4. Forbidden Planet 5. The Maltese Falcon 6. Fargo 7. Fahrenheit 451 8. Where Eagles Dare 9. The IPCRESS File Others may occur to me throughout the day, especially as this is great displacement activity for what I'm supposed to be doing. Let's have yours!

Just as a quick tangent, have we had a 'films you keep going back to' thread? I may have to start one! Sorry - back to the original thread...

Now that's pretty special! A friend of mine sent me this photo a couple of years ago, which also made me chuckle.

I was going to go for the love child of Jar Jar Binks and Princess Armadillo (or whatever she was called) but I think they'd have had to be 100 years old or something when they had her, which might not be quite so plausible...

Ha ha! Many years ago I worked for a Dutch pesticide company that would insist on my participation in interminable marketing meetings, usually to decide on the name for a new product. I know nothing about marketing, so to alleviate the boredom I used to propose wholly unsuitable names that they might not fully understand, and see how long it took before they realised. I am ashamed to say that TWAT! and FIST! both came dangerously close to being launched in Europe.

Took the boys to see it after school on Friday. Although I enjoyed it, I thought Kylo Ren was about as intimidating as a petulant teenager, and couldn't help thinking that a few more smacked bottoms as a child would have saved the galaxy a whole heap of trouble.

Mate, every time I see your name in a thread I know I'm going to be laughing!

This is great! I'll be able to attend the product launch with a clear conscience and sit sniggering at the back

Then I'm putting you down as a vote for not telling them!

Perhaps it's a Stoke thing, but number 3 was always the accepted definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... ble+header Every day's a school day!

On Friday I received an email from a Czech company, asking for my help in registering their new dual-action amenity fungicide. Because this product has two active ingredients and is for use in sports turf they have decided to call it 'Double Header'. You see the problem. Now, do I tell them what this term means in the English speaking world, or do I say nothing and let them carry on? Hmm... Tricky one...

Every conversation is the same. I once had a surreal phone call from her about Procol Harum until I realised she meant Boko Haram

My conversations with my mother are the stuff of legend on Facebook. This was from a Christmas shopping trip last week: Ooh, I like this song, Mark. "Blue Moon Arising". - Bad Moon Rising. Oh yes. By Creedence Clearblue. - Clearwater. Hmm? - Creedence Clearwater. Are you sure? I could swear it's Clearblue. - That's a pregnancy test, you halfwit. Honestly, you are rude...

A couple of years ago I was listening to a professional underwater photographer who was talking about this being the 'age of lost images'. His point was that back before digital there was a cost associated with buying film and having it processed, so you'd be more inclined to consider each shot before you took it, and when you got your images back from the lab you'd go through them all individually and chuck out the rubbish. If anything stood out as being particularly good you might get it blown up and framed, and stick it on the wall. Nowadays you can take a machine-gun approach, firing off fifty shots of the same thing in a few seconds, possibly reviewing them in-camera if you can be bothered, and then going on to the next thing with 700 shots still left on your memory card. Then when you get home (or run out of memory) you upload them to the computer to be reviewed at a later date. And there they stay. I know I was guilty of that: I'd had a few digital compacts over the years, but when I finally bought a digital SLR a couple of years ago I got an EOS 5D mkIII and used it a lot. And as much as I love it, it has made me lazy: I ended up with a lot of shots that I didn't have time to sit down and review properly, and when I did I'd end up cursing myself for having been so trigger-happy. I'm getting better though! I also avoided Photoshop and Lightroom for a long time, I suspect like other people because I saw it as cheating. But even with film, once you've pressed the shutter there is still plenty you can do in the darkroom to alter the final result, from basic dodging, burning-in and masking to more complex retouching operations. In fact some of the most iconic photographs from the pre-digital era were massively manipulated in the darkroom. So I do use Lightroom quite a bit now, but not to do any gross manipulations: generally speaking, the more I tinker with an image the less I like the end result. I have also picked up my old OM20 an OM40 again, partly because my eldest is interested in how film is processed and printed, but partly because I still like the feel of a really basic SLR in my hand.

I have a tube of EvoStik Impact Instant Contact Adhesive - worth a try do you reckon?

Hi folks. I need to re-fit the rubber grips on my old OM40 because the adhesive has yellowed and failed. I've removed and cleaned them, and it looks as though some sort of very thin, clear double-sided tape was used originally. There doesn't seem to be much useful info out there on what to use, other than that most things don't work very well. Any thoughts on the best thing to use? Ta!

I have the answer to arming the police, courtesy of my 7 year old. I went to the chippy with him yesterday evening, and he struck up a conversation with a couple of armed policemen who came in for their tea: Is that a real gun? - Yes young man, it is. Have you ever shot anyone? - Only naughty boys who don't share their chips with their daddy. What's that yellow thing? - It's a Taser. It's a kind of stun gun. It shoots out electrodes and gives people an electric shock. Like Lucy's lipstick? - Err... In Despicable Me, Lucy has a special lipstick that stuns baddies. - That sounds neat! Well actually it's in Despicable Me 2, because Lucy isn't in Despicable Me 1, only Gru and Dr Nefario, and Vector is the bad guy who tries to steal the moon... - I see... But in the second film Lucy has her special lipstick, and she uses it to stun people. - A lipstick would be smaller to carry around than all this stuff, wouldn't it? Yes, but Lucy is a girl, and you are boys. Boys don't carry lipsticks, only girls, so if you pulled out a lipstick the baddies would know you were going to zap them. - True... But if you put it in a shaver...

I thought I'd round it up to a nice tidy £150, but forgot that the extra 55p transaction fee would push it over. Good job I don't have OCD!

I have a funny relationship with photography, partly because it is pretty much the only point of connection I have with my father. He'd been a keen photographer all his life, and back in the 1980s he used to do a lot of his own processing and printing. I spent many hours in the darkroom watching him at work, and although he never welcomed my presence (I was always tolerated rather than encouraged) I learned a lot. He kicked the bucket when I was 15, and having been given all his gear by my mother I carried on for a few years. For one reason or another I drifted away from it for a long time, and only really got interested again about ten years ago. Another short hiatus followed, and then I took the plunge and went completely digital a couple of years ago. Anyway - neither here nor there. It took me a long time even to understand what sort of photography I like, especially as almost everything I saw or took myself left me cold. As much as I love nature I can't stand photographs of animals (I have a particular hatred of photos of horses, dogs, cats - pretty much anything on legs really) and I loathe artsy landscapes: if it's a blurry image of water taken with a filter I'm guaranteed to hate it, anything that says 'in the gloaming' just makes me cross, and if it's a night-time sky shot of swirly stars I'm going to chuck the magazine across the room. I have come to the conclusion that what I really like is street photography - B&W or colour - and probably urban shots from the 1950s to 1980s best of all. I'm not very good at it - I went out on Friday night around town, and binned every image I took - but I have plans to get better!

Ah, this is the life: when all I have to do to have my eldest son tell me I'm amazing is fix his Lego spaceship. I'm enjoying it while it lasts, because one day, not far from now, this wide-eyed hero worship will be replaced by the stark realisation that actually, daddy is a knob.

As of this morning I have a new one: People who don't put their contact details in their business email signature. AGHH!!!!