CRC WEB SITE (12. 12. 09)

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December 12th 2009

It was with much regret that I decided to resign from the Colour Reversal Club in December 2007. It has been very much a part of me since joining back in the early 70's. Over those years I met such great friends and learned so much about film, film processing, meeting and knowing many people and learning much about life in general. However, my personal situation over the last 3 years changed so drastically that many of the things and loss of people around me has drained much of what I used to hold dear. To add to this the march of Digital Photography and changes in the law that reduced the usefulness of the C.R.C. left little new to add to our hobby and that little or nothing became available for CRC Newsletter copy. Much of the last newsletters were virtually made up from my own photographic activities with just Roy Salmons and Brian Asquith adding whatever they could. Eventually my own film and processing activities came to a halt and was relying on digital photography completely.

My health too plus much of my usual resolve for CRC matters drained away and no matter how often I tried to return to forming newsletter copy nothing productive came from it. Likewise, over those same years CRC members' activity and communications reduced to virtually zero. Some communications continued but with longer and longer periods between them.

We lost two longstanding members over the last year or so, Frank White and George Sparkes. Frank attended most of the annual Didcot Meetings as well as at the other venues and kept in touch quite regularly with me. He produced a number of articles for the CRC New.

George was one of the three people who stuck with the Club back in the early 80's when it almost folded after a group split to form themselves into another Club. George, along with Brian Savage and Kevin Craske took on official positions that allowed me, when taking on as CRC Editor, to keep things together. I also got a lot of support from the late Oliver Barron and Ron Knowles who continued his regular 'Round-A-Bout column. This was continued after Ron passed on and Brian Asquith took on his regular and excellent 'The Cobbler' column. Thankfully, the CRC went on to enjoy many successful years that only started to fail when Digital photography increased in quality and cost. It really was a loosing battle. Dealers dropped film and cameras very quickly and the present day situation is mainly for the really dedicated film user.

Ron Croad played his part remarkably well on storing, purchasing and distributing processing Chemicals as well as selling Konicachrome films to members. Ron gave up this position due to ill health but continued to sell the films until Konica dropped this service due to the march of Digital photography but the sale of chemicals continued by John Pearle who did an equally excellent job and like most of us, found things difficult to continue when new laws of posting chemicals came about. John's mother Rita along with her late husband, Major were also regular contributors to the CRC Newsletter and who can forget the many Home-made gadgets, processing trials and technical help they came up with after the changeover from CR50 to E4 then E6 film and processing. Sadly, Rita also died about two years back. I will always have happy memories of them both.

Ron Croad has been suffering with his legs and is confined to his home most of the time but he is looked after by his sister, who has kept me, and others, informed of his situation and it is always nice to hear from Ron from time to time.

I have kept in touch with a number of members by exchanging Christmas cards and manage to keep up to date from time to time. The saddest thing of course is learning of yet another CRC friend passing on and along with this year's Christmas cards was the sad news from Gwen Willicombe that he husband Glyn died 2 days before last Christmas day. Gwen & Glyn used their own hybrid processing formula that always produced excellent results and presented many colourful photos in the Folio section.

Also via a Christmas card I learned from Mrs. Powell that Colin has been quite ill this past while and is in a care home. You will all remember Colin as our excellent Treasurer and who kept a firm grip of the Club's finances. Colin was a joy to know and was always fair in his dealings as Treasurer and also with everyone he met. He also has a great sense of humour. I can but hope that he will get well enough to get back home once again and will always have him in my thoughts.

The early Newsletters were produced on Wax Stencils, which worked well enough but was a timely and messy system. My main aim was always to improve the newsletter both in quality and presentation. The Club purchased an electronic typewriter that made considerable improvement but was still using Wax Stencils, then by chance I met a dealer who had his own printing business and he offered a reasonable deal to have the newsletters printed in an A4 booklet format. That in itself increased the print quality and the look of the newsletter but when attempting to use B&W photographs it became uneconomical. Kevin Craske then offered to not only print the newsletters to the same format but with excellent quality B&W photographs, followed later with some colour print pages.

Another big leap in technology came about when I got my first computer. This was an Atari 600 XL, which after loading in the word processor only had enough memory left to print half an A4 page, which meant forming the page files in two halves, top then bottom and passing the paper through the printer twice for every page. I next upgraded to an Atari 800 XL, which at least allowed a full A4 page to be printing in one run. In fact the hard work with the XL's was that you had to type in codes, at the start of a word then again at the end of the word to start and stop any font, bold or Italic changes. It was quite time consuming. Next came an Atari FM, with a massive 125k memory. This massively improved the word processing, with menus for any changes to text, font etc and so much memory that there was no limit to the amount of pages that could be composed. This also added easier use of Desk Top Publishing (DTP) programmes that sped up page formatting of text and graphics, which meant that colour sketches and photographs could be added. The last Atari I had was the Atari STE, which seemed to be the ultimate PC at that time but the real change came when I moved on to the PC. The increase in processing power, speed colour quality etc was incredible. It's difficult to believe now that an Atari 600 XL ran with only 16K of memory while today were are talking in Mega Bites and Giga Bites. The introduction of the 1mb floppy disc was incredible but today we have CD data at 650MB and DVD data discs at over 4 Gigabites. Of course, while this technology made processing easier and faster it also added to the demise of film and processing with Digital pictures having up to 10 or 12 MB's giving more than enough resolution to print up to Billboard size images.

Since writing the above comments I was given a 1 Terabyte External Drive for my last birthday and that is an incredible amount of available memory when you look back at the very humble 600XL.

This all came together when another change of printer/dealer, Roy Salmons took over and produced the extremely high quality that improved with each issue. Roy was able to keep both printing and paper costs down due to his photographic business. In fact, both Kevin Craske and Roy received a lot of help from their family to staple the pages and to pack and distribute the newsletters for which we are very grateful. In both cases a number of costs were reduced or even eliminated through their help. This effort was also used during our Annual Meetings at Didcot. I have nice memories of my wife and children helping with the catering during many of the Didcot meetings and Kevin's children did the same when we held one of our meetings in Norfolk.

The activity amongst the members was phenomenal and many turned up from quite far a field bringing all sorts of projection equipment and putting on really nice slide presentations and photographic exhibitions.

For a few years annual meetings were held at Repton Collage in Derbyshire and those too are very memorable. Fantastic surroundings and great company when along with slides and print exhibitions we had some excellent talks from main dealers.

In all, what has to be remembered is that without the Colour Reversal Club home processing may well have gone or reduced to a few dedicated photographers when CR50 film went off the market and the 100C processing came about with E4 & E6 film technology. While film was available there were no home-processing kits available except the very expensive Kodak chemistry. Through the hard work of a number of technically minded members a working E6 formula was produced and the numerous dry and wet chemicals required made available at extremely economic prices. Kits were fine but you had to use up the whole kit even when you didn't have the maximum number of films to process, but the working formula allowed you to make up as much chemical as you required plus purchase near to exact amount of chemicals required. Along with the special deal the club had with Konica for the E6 films this made photography and home processing financially acceptable to all who enjoyed processing their own work. Added to this was the friendly way of sharing working and technical problems via the quarterly newsletters. Most years members could meet up at the annual get-together and share in their latest successes and failures, knowing that their good work would be appreciated and answers come forth of solving the problems. Until the latter years when fuel costs etc made weekly or monthly meetings impossible each CRC area around the U.K. often met to share their local interests.

While the Colour Reversal Club may be idle this web site will be held active for as long as I am able to do so and any new information will be added as and when available. You can continue to look back through many years of newsletters and catch up with old stories and people. If at all possible I may still manage to add the last few newsletters and some earlier ones to this web site. If anyone who wishes to continue communications and contact with me you are very welcome.

Any fresh news that comes to me will be added to this section. My email, address is at the bottom of this page. Please feel free to write.

There are too many of you to thank personally but I extend my thanks for all the support, encouragement and friendship that you all gave me over the years and adding to the enjoyment I have had from being a CRC Member and Editor.

As an example of just how life moves on and through many dark periods there is always too 'that' special happening that lifts your spirits once again. This was the excellent news, just yesterday, that my son and his wife are expecting what will be my first grandchild. If all goes well this happy event should occur this coming June. I never thought that I would make being a granddad but obviously looking forward to it very much.

Sincerely.

August 2004 Further Newsletters added....

Thanks to Eric Weatherill, who sent me some back copies of the CRC Newsletters. These are from the 'wax stencil' days and thanks to Optical Character Recognition (O.C.R). I have been able to convert them into basic computer text which saves hours and hours of re-typing and I have now added issues 40, 41 to 46 for 1986. It is nice to have been able to make all those typo correction that have annoyed me for all these years!

You may wish to renew your viewing and reading of these past articles, or if you are a newer member, learn about the period when we were starting to come to terms with the new E6 films and processing. It is nice too, to give mention to many of the late, and great, characters who were so active in making the Club such a success.

Further back-newsletters will be added as I have the time to complete them.

CRCNews May/June 2004

On Sunday 23rd of may a CRC A.G.M. and Open Meeting was held at The Grappenhall Village Hall, near Warrington. The picture below is a combination of the two that was taken as record shots. This was so that everyone could get into the picture. If your 'editor' appears to be standing a bit in the background, looking on, this is due to using the cut and paste facilities of the computer graphics programme, to avoid having to print two photo's almost identical to each other. Apart from the different scale just try spotting the 'joins'.......

Bill Broadurst, Margaret & Roy Salmons, Eric Deeming, unknown, Derrik Forster, Dave Deeming, Dave Morrell and Bill Reid

A full report of the AGM and Meeting will appear in the July CRCN and also in the latest CRCN page (113) on this web site.  A very pleasant afternoon  was spent meeting everyone and along with disussing the present needs of the CRC two slide shows were presented by Dave & Eric Deeming and Mike Puttick and a very fine B&W Print Exhibition by Derik Forster, most normal developed prints but with a few digitally printed.

Many thanks to Bill Broadhust for arranging and booking the venue, and to Margarate and Roy for very nice refreshments.

The above is a digital photo.