h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I keep getting them. Very, very vivid ones, as if I'm right there again, in a particular time. I'll suddenly get a strong sensation of the feeling, the vibe of that time. Because all the periods of your life do have a certain, well, taste, for want of a better word. The early 70s taste different to the late 70s, which taste different to the 60s and the 80s. The 90s... they were a bit bland really and didn't taste of anything much at all.

I get a particularly strong one when I watch the end credits of the first (black and white) series of The Avengers with Emma Peel in it. The theme tune to The Prisoner often brings it on too, but there doesn't have be a trigger - usually they come out of nowhere.

And the sun always seems to be shining

I used to get that... but not for a rather long time now.

Considering how badly my memory has deteriorated lately, I'm not surprised.



But speaking of which, someday soon, I'll be posting a photo album, probably on Wordpress, or maybe just Imgur, of some of the pics I took while in England in late Spring, 1985. I'd like to crowd source you folks to identify the locations. Some of them, I know exactly where they are. Obviously I need no help identifying the Battersea Power Station. I know the towns in which some of them were taken, but not the streets. Obviously things may have changed drastically after 30 years. Ideally we'll tag them with their current Google Street View locations. I think this will be a fun project.


The images look like I've gone wild with the Instagram filters, but that's what color negatives look like after not being stored properly, in a hot, disused darkroom with no A/C on the Gulf Coast of Texas for three decades. I rather like the effects.

Ooh, I'm looking forward to seeing those

Speaking of which, I still have all the negatives of every picture I took with my old Zenit camera more than 30 years ago, including the only time I went to every single day of a test Match (England v Australia at The Oval, 1981). They haven't been stored in ideal conditions either but I'd really like to get some of them developed - I didn't always keep all the handhelds.

Developed or scanned?

You can scan a colour negative and get the equivalent of a developed photo from it? If I could afford it I wouldn't mind having both, to be honest.

Well, I was mostly asking if you had the film developed. I assume you did and that they're still not in the canisters.


Since it's my field I tend to be pedantic about the terms. For me, development simply means developing the film, chemically. Printing is separate from developing.



I actually bought a fairly high quality 35mm film scanner to scan my images. I spent a couple of hundred dollars on it. It probably wasn't worth the cost, but anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

You can have a service scan your negatives for around $0.25 - $0.75 each. But if you have enough, it may be cheaper to just buy an inexpensive scanner. You can get one for around $50. I spent $300 on a Plustek scanner but I'm not sure a $50 scanner wouldn't have sufficed. Oh, well, I really hope the software will be compatible with Win10 when I upgrade.

Oh, but yes. You can take a digital scan from a negative and have a high quality print made on photographic paper.

You're right - I meant printed. The films were developed and I got the negatives and the prints back but I didn't always keep all the prints. I don't think I kept any of that cricket match But I did, thankfully, keep the negatives.