Grandparents On Film

Something a bit different today. Avid followers will know that I was born in Tasmania, and a lot of my family still lives there. I moved over to Melbourne when I was 4 or so, so I consider myself more of a Melbournian (“what do you mean this coffee isn’t small batch?!”) but I still try to make it back to the island every Christmas.

I’m lucky in that I still have three grandparents, and they are all fit and healthy. Especially in recent years, I have become more and more appreciative of the fact that they are still around, but also more aware that this won’t be the case forever. It’s not a nice thing to think about, and most of the time I don’t contemplate it, but sometimes it is important to remember that not everything is permanent.

But let’s not go there.

Last year I found a whole heap of black and white Ilford that I had rolled in high-school, so I decided to start shooting a few frames here and there every so often. I use a small Canon film camera, and I love it because it’s so tiny, but it also fits all of the lenses from my usual kit. I prefer, however, to use it with the cheapest plastic lens I have- a 50mm. This lens weighs next to nothing, and looks cheap and nasty, but there is something about it that I love- the shallow depth of field, the way it vignettes really badly… it’s the stuff dreams are made of haha.

So I took this camera with me to Tasmania over Christmas last year, as I had shot some film in Tokyo and wanted to finish off the roll. I also wanted to take some portraits of my grandparents, because everything just looks great on film, and I thought they might be good for the ‘ol family albums.

Above are my paternal grandparents. These are straight out of camera, but I got the negatives scanned and put on a CD. No adjustments at all. I love the way that film looks so real. So much depth and tone, even with no processing. To me, it’s like looking at a small part of each person.

My grandma is known for her world-famous potatoes, and has kept every letter from every grandchild ever written (once I discovered this archive, I was a lot more careful what I wrote!). My grandad is a photographer (maybe that’s where I got it from?), and his framed prints of the many mountains he has climbed line the hallway in their house. Both of them will annihilate you at Scrabble.

On my mother’s side, I have just one grandparent. Everyone calls him Popsie. I’m absolutely in love with this candid photo of him in the garden. Popsie grows the best vegetables, and I always look forward to eating them when I go back over there. He has a dog named Zeus, who will come up to you and put his foot on you. Whenever we stay with Popsie, mum always tries to buy him some new form of technology. He’s mastered the usage of cordless phones and the digital set-top box, but he narrowly escaped being set up with an Optus mobile phone plan this January.