Photographic History: Continuing the Puffin Theme!

Following from my trip to the Farne Islands on Thursday (see here) I thought I'd blip a "photo of this photo" which I took 39 years ago, on a trip to the Farne Islands in the glorious UK summer of 1976.

At the time I'd recently bought my first (35mm) SLR camera, a Praktica LTL, along with a 135mm lens and a 2x teleconverter. So this shot was taken using this kit at its maximum focal length, ie 270mm. The Praktica was a lovely camera to handle but it was very unreliable, requiring a repair 2 years running, so later that year I sold it and bought an Olympus OM1 - which was even lovelier (and which has never gone wrong, and which I still have - although I admit it's a few years since I last used it).

The image was taken on Kodachrome transparency film. We had a primitive darkroom setup in the bathroom at home, and I made this print directly from the transparency on Cibachrome (later called Ilfochrome) paper. This was a positive-to-positive process which produced high quality prints with very stable dyes - this photo has been on display at home for most of the intervening years and hasn't faded at all.

It's with a little sadness that I note from the wikipedia article on Ilfochrome that the last production run of this paper was made in 2012 - a consequence of the move to digital.