Vinyl Revival

[springwood64]

I just came out of a tiny record shop in Stroud Gloucestershire that was packed with 20-somethings buying vinyl from the 70s and 80s. The last time I experienced this, I was one of the 20-somethings, and it was the 80s.

Plus I bought 3 albums for a total of £15. It's like I'd time travelled back nearly half a century

[ThomasOK]

I just came out of a tiny record shop in Stroud Gloucestershire that was packed with 20-somethings buying vinyl from the 70s and 80s. The last time I experienced this, I was one of the 20-somethings, and it was the 80s.

Plus I bought 3 albums for a total of £15. It's like I'd time travelled back nearly half a century

Oh yeah, that's been going on for several years at least. We would get some of them coming into the store to get entry level turntables, amps and speakers, often used. They were virtually all interested in records of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They know when much of the best music was being made.

[Arjen]

I just came out of a tiny record shop in Stroud Gloucestershire that was packed with 20-somethings buying vinyl from the 70s and 80s. The last time I experienced this, I was one of the 20-somethings, and it was the 80s.

Plus I bought 3 albums for a total of £15. It's like I'd time travelled back nearly half a century

Same trend happens in Photograpy, where youngsters focus on vintage analogue camera’s, negative films and hand printing in the good ol’ darkroom.

[springwood64]

My youngest has picked up 35mm photography. I used to have my own darkroom, but stopped using it in the 1990s after printing the colour slides from my honeymoon. The paper I printed on is gorgeous, and has an almost iridescent quality. The prints show no signs of degradation, and still look beautiful despite their age.

I recently digitally scanned (ie photographed with my digital camera) the original slides and reprocessed them digitally. The camera and lens I used at the time was a budget model, yet the images still have distinct quality that digital has not yet been able to reproduce, despite the better optical quality of modern lenses and higher resolution of digital sensors.

I've subsequently bought an old professional 35mm SLR (for not much more than the cost of 5 reels of film) that uses the same lenses as my digital camera, and my youngest and I have shared some 35mm photo hikes on Dartmoor.

It's really a very different experience to digital photography because you only have 36 frames, each one will cost you approx £4, and will take a few weeks before you see the result. This means that every image demands a much higher up front commitment from the photographer than for digital.

I take a great deal more care and I am much more selective over my subject. That means I miss a lot of possible images, but the quality of each image I do capture is much higher.

Perhaps it is a little analogous to the difference between vinyl listening and streaming. They are different experiences, with different strengths and weaknesses.

[Arjen]

image.jpg

Iggy Pop, Summer Beach Festival, Zeebrugge, Belgium, 1994

Pete, I love your story about 35 mm photography and young ones who grew up in modern digitial times picking up their parents analogue equipment.
I’ve still my dark room, but stopped developing and printing about 15 years ago, now using the dark room for cleaning second hand vinyl.
Developing and printing always have given me great joy, and making pictures opened doors to rooms, places, events and people I otherwise never had met and experienced.
I think analogue photography as analogue vinyl playing ask more selection and focus and gives more a deepening in satisfaction, apart from discussions about quality and results. anaway, I prefer my physical barytprints over my digital photographs in the cloud on or disc. And until now I I myself haven’t cross the Rubicon to streaming, like I did in Photograpy (and typewriting). Staying away from the seduction of the Instant.

[springwood64]

image.jpg
Iggy Pop, Summer Beach Festival, Zeebrugge, Belgium, 1994

That is a great portrait Arjen!