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Here is the summer house, at the bottom of Gran and Grampy Biggs garden at 104 Naunton Crescent, Cheltenham, sometime in the 1950s. It's no longer there, but if it was it would have a story to tell. It arrived one dark and cold night in the mid 1950s as a kit of parts on a lorry. The only way to reach the garden was through the narrow hall way of their terraced house, so it was unloaded from a lorry parked in front of the house in the background. That house belonged to the Ward family in Naunton Way. With the aid of ladders and hissing Tilley lamps, it was gingerly manhandled piece by piece over the wall and into the garden by Dad and Uncle Fred and Mr Ward. The walls, floor and roof were all carefully laid out on the lawn ready to be erected on the specially prepared concrete base that had once been Walt's vegetable patch.

It became a playroom, a cool place to sit and have tea on a hot summer's day, a shop supplied with empty frozen food packets from 'Aunty' Topsy, and a garage for my Dinky Toys under the verandah. Uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews came to sit or play in it. It was witness to clockwork train sets in the garden, Toddles the Tortoise, Walt mowing the lawn and tending the garden, and Great Grandmother falling in the garden next door and being taken to Delancy hospital where she died. It saw governments come and go, Sputnik passing overhead, fireworks being let off on Bonfire nights, and Jetex powered balsa wood planes being launched from the garden and landing with a loud 'thunk' in the empty street outside. And until it was torn down over a quarter of a century later, it wore a proud reminder of that cold dark 1950's night - the footprint of one of Dad's Wellington boots on the underside of the roof.

Every family has a story to tell and pieced together they make a family history. Ours starts in Shurdington in 1792, with the birth of William Wallace, at the time of the French Revolution, and takes us to the 21st Century, Brexit, and with your help, beyond - or even further back in time. Of course all stories are told from the perspective of the person telling them - my own story began in 1951 - so your perspective will be different to mine, but over time all these stories - and photographs - will add up to make a complete family history.

E V E R Y   P I C T U R E   T E L L S   A   S T O R Y 
Fox-Talbot produced his first successful photographic images in 1834 and although photography rapidly became popular most early family photographs will have been taken in photographer's studios. The use of photographic glass plates meant long exposure times, so the subject had to sit absolutely still, often resulting in stilted obviously posed and self-conscious photographs. With the introduction of roll film and smaller cameras, photography became available to everyone, the local chemist providing a developing and printing service - although often the results of amateur efforts were disappointing !

Uncle Ted (Edward Cotton) became an unofficial family photographer, snapping away at family events and on holidays. At first sight some of the images he produced are of indifferent quality but the beauty of the modern computer screen is that unlike the reflected light from a printed image, light is projected through the image on the screen giving even some of the dullest photographic images a new vibrancy. 

ABOVE: Dad (Robert 'Bob' Emerson) in a quiet moment on the verandah, probably doing the crossword in the newspaper. E R Cotton.  RIGHT: Uncle Ted (Edward Cotton) caught napping on a sunny afternoon. John Emerson.  HEADER PHOTO: Iris's by the fishpond, with the summer house and Richard Emerson in the background. E R Cotton

Richard waits for another fare in our rather battered pedal car on a hot summer's day around 1959 (above left), while John goes native by the wigwam (centre). At right, George Cotton strikes the pose sometime in the early 1970s. Below, John at the slightly less than OK Corral (left), and fascination around the fishpond. All E R Cotton

A case in point is the header photograph. Taken on 35mm colour transparency film, nothing is actually in focus - this is the result of the type of camera used at the time which did not have a through the lens viewfinder. Exposure time, aperture size and depth of field (the distance between subject and camera to keep the image in focus), all had to be calculated from a chart or table and exposure meter. Or alternatively by guesswork - earlier I mentioned visits to the chemist to have films developed and picking up the resulting prints a week or so later could be a big disappointment ! Without through the lens viewfinders strange things like telephone poles, chimneys and lamp posts sprouting out of heads could happen - or parts of heads cut off altogether (right). And if the exposure was wrong you ended up with a grey mess - 'old socks and chocolate' as an Art College tutor once put it.

LEFT: Photography in a pre-digital age - the very basic Kodak No.2 'Box Brownie' (top) used 120 roll film giving 12 exposures. The 1930s Zeiss Ikon bellows type camera (centre) was a little more sophisticated with a better quality lens and also used 120 roll film. In the 1950s this Halina camera (lower left), was a popular model, using 35mm roll film, but still lacking through the lens viewfinder. Similar cameras would have been used by Ted Cotton and others from the 1920s onwards.

My Yashica Pentamatic SLR (lower right) is a high quality single lens reflex (through the lens viewfinder) camera from the 1960s. It used 35mm roll film, had a standard 55mm focal length lens which could be changed for various wide angle or telephoto lenses. Fastest shutter speed was 1/1000th of a second. I liked the feel of this rugged camera compared to a Pentax and it lasted from the time that I bought it at Art College more or less until I went digital. ​

​T H E   D I G I T A L   R E V O L U T I O N
With the advent of digital imaging photography has become easier and universal. The first digital camera was created in the Kodak laboratory in 1975 and was about the size of a toaster ! Now phones, tablets and other devices have some sort of digital imaging capability as standard, often with built in filters or software to enhance or modify the image. No longer do we have to rely on guesswork or calculations from light meters, or make trips to the chemist. Look again through your digital selfies, family and other photos - there may be lots of future family history in them too !

​LEFT: My trusty Canon G12 ten megapixel digital camera has now seen many years of hard use, and due for replacement. Brilliant for static shots, but not so good for still shots of moving subjects. Images are captured on an eight megabyte memory card and transferred to the computer. This digital image was actually taken on my iPad (right) which along with the iPhone also does a reasonable job with video/audio - although editing video and audio is another skill altogether !

Most of the photographs on these pages were taken by Uncle Ted using roll film cameras similar to the three on the left, so are variable in quality, but he left a large collection of black & white images and colour transparencies. Others were taken by Mum or Dad (Peggy and Bob), Michael Cotton, myself and others from my various collections which also includes several thousand railway photographs.

G E T T I N G   T E C H N I C A L
Photographs from the pre-digital age were originally taken on glass plates, later roll film, both coated with a light sensitive emulsion. Plates and film had to be loaded into the camera with care as any stray light would spoil the film. Once exposed, the film had to be removed from the camera, again with care, and processed - either at home or at a Chemist shop (later specialist photographic dealers and photo processing labs emerged that did bulk processing). This involved putting the film into a chemical bath (developer), washing and drying. At this stage the film was a negative image (ie: white or light areas of the photo were black or shades of black), so enlarged positive prints (enprints) had to be made. This was done by passing light through the negative to light sensitive paper in a darkroom (usually illuminated with a low wattage red lamp that would not affect the otherwise light sensitive paper). The exposed prints were then put into a chemical bath (developer) and when the image had formed were put into another chemical bath (fixer), before being washed and dried. Your photographs would finally be ready to be collected about a week or so after the film had been dropped off for developing. Worth bearing in mind next time you take a selfie is that you don't have to wait a week or so to see the result !

Photographic images deteriorate over time, especially if they have not been 'fixed' or washed for the right length of time, which is why some old photos have faded or become discoloured over the years. Most people don't realise that digital images can also deteriorate over time - each time a JPEG image is copied it will have less digital information, so after many generations of copying there will be more 'noise' in the image. Original images are best stored as TIFF files. The CCD chip in digital cameras can also degrade over time, especially with a lot of use, usually noticed as random black spots in the image. Long term storage of digital images and media also poses problems as software is being continually updated and hardware becomes obsolete. It is reckoned that storage media and hardware should be reviewed/renewed every ten years or so. Images from my various collections are gradually being transferred to two Seagate STEL 4000 four terabyte hard drives - a far cry from a packet of B&W prints from the chemist - and which should see me through to my eighties . . !

Black & white and colour prints have been scanned on a flatbed Canon MG3500, colour transparencies and B&W negatives scanned on an Epson Perfection 2450, with any digital 'tweaking' done on the Mac. It is just not practical to scan all of them - there are far too many - and as mentioned some are not of a publishable quality. But here's a thing, that out of focus header image, dismissed as a reject all those years ago, now makes a perfect image in the context of these web pages - and these days 'soft focus' images are quite a fashionable trend on TV and in magazines - every picture tells a story !

MORE TALES FROM A SUMMER HOUSE
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