VE Day and a wander with a Baby Brownie.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not at all into flag waving and revelling in “Victory in Europe”, to me it smacks of small person jingoism and constantly harks back to a “we beat the Germans” mantra that, quite frankly I feel we should move past.

By all means lets remember this event but in a more considered manner.

So, please if I have offended you feel free to unfollow of just dismiss my rant.

In our village, like many others across the land in the lockdown days of March and April there was a sense that this event still had to be marked in some way. To be honest I’m sure a lot of the villagers just used it as an excuse to sit in their front gardens, often a bit too close to neighbours and get pissed, whilst waving a flag at folks walking by.

So you get the picture, we didn’t have any bunting up but we did walk around the village and see lots of drunk people waving flags and singing (dear Lord save me) “we’ll meet again”.

Not only did we walk around the village but, and here we get to the photo part, I took my vintage 127 Baby Brownie with me with the intention of taking people’s portraits and making prints, giving them a copy clearly.

If you are unfamiliar with the Baby Brownie it’s this little art deco Bakelite beauty, cute little pop up finder and a shutter lever at the bottom. You need some 127 film of course, but I have plenty of that plus I cut my own using the FAKMATIC slitter (https://camerahack.it).

I put a roll of 400 speed Rerapan in there and to this day I don’t know why, with that shutter speed of no more than 1/50th of a second the negs were a tad over exposed. No big deal though.

I made prints using the glass carrier in my Meopta Magnifax (the best Meopta out there by far) and as promised, popped copies through the door with a note thanking them and asking for permission to share their images.

I enlarged to 10×8 and this was about the limit of that lens.