[Tech1] Lifetime photo collections

Sun Feb 7 10:15:49 CST 2021

You sure as hell deserved that slice of fame Doug. I agree with you about the original. 

Dave Newbitt

From: Puddifoot(Doug) via Tech1 
Sent: Sunday, February 7, 2021 4:05 PM
To: patheigham 
Cc: Tech1 
Subject: Re: [Tech1] Lifetime photo collections

Your reminiscences  of darkrooms and film stock certainly brought back memories to me Pat. In the days when some programs were recorded on 35mm film, you could go and ask them if they had any ends of reels. You would normally get around twenty five feet, which would fill about five cassettes. I used a most of it shooting some friends who had just formed a group called Queen. 

This is at the Marquee. It was very slow film, 25ASA I think. It needed creative developing when shooting in low light levels like this.  They then wanted me to do the cover of their first LP,
and wanted a colour photo session in Freddie’s flat. The camera was a Zenith 3M SLR, and I managed to cobble together some lights with Photoflood bulbs, but not really enough light for colour. Only daylight negative film was available then, and I knew that by the time added the blue correction filter, it would be very difficult to shoot. I then discovered that it was possible to buy short lengths of artificial light Eastmancolor negative, presumably leftovers from the Film industry. So that is what I used.

This photo was chosen to be the cover, but Brian had seen some photos in the Times Colour Supplement by the Lumiere brothers using the Autocrome process, and that’s how they wanted it to look. The Lumieres made the glass photo plate sticky, sprinkled it with grains of potato starch coloured red, green, and blue. The plate was then squeezed so that each globular grain became flat coloured filter. The photograph was taken and reversal processed to produce a colour slide. My method was to cover a sheet of black card with red, green, and blue glitter powder, photograph that, and use it as a mask negative on top of the main negative. You can see the result, and everyone was happy.........for a while, then Brian had an other idea based on stress patterns in stretched cling film photographed with opposing polaroid filters. He had chosen a photo of Freddie taken at the same Marquee gig, arms raised, with beams from overhead light shining on him. He wanted the beams enlarged and rotated slightly. He wanted me to stretch cling film to produce rainbow coloured lines when shot with the crossed polaroid filters. The multi-coloureds streaks were to be inserted into the beams to make it look as if Freddie was illuminated with rainbow light. Although the effect was bright to the eye, it never photographed well, and looked washed out in the print. I printed several versions of the idea and others I thought might work.  At the same time I was producing hundreds of prints for Freddie and Brian to create the montage for the back of the album. Decision time came, and I went to a meeting at EMI. We decided on the changes that needed to be made, and I was then told it was needed by the next day to meet the print deadline. So all night in the darkroom and I managed to deliver. 

Eighty per cent of the photos on the back are mine, and I printed them all for the montage. I was paid about £250 for the work. I had never colour printed before, so I spent that and more on paper and chemicals.  I still prefer the original. That might have made it on to the recent Queen stamps. Still, over the years I have a few lines in the authorised Queen biography, I have been interviewed for a history of queen DVD, and given a talk at a fan club weekend. I had  photos in a Freddie Mercury exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, and in their “Greatest Pix” book Lord Snowden has the front cover, and mine is the first photo inside. But I have to say that the most staggering thing to me is that typing Douglas Puddifoot into Google gets 25,000 hits. I had very great enjoyment out of the whole thing, and certainly got my five minutes of fame. Also they did purchase my archive of negatives a few years ago for a little more than they paid for the work at the time.

Doug

From: patheigham via Tech1 
Sent: Sunday, February 7, 2021 12:40 PM
To: Barry Bonner ; tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk 
Subject: Re: [Tech1] Lifetime photo collections

Barry’s posting reminded me of an earlier hobby – I used to do my own home processing of reversal film – a photoflood through the transparent film loading spirals.

Working on ‘Fiddler’ the DoP was interested that I was using a stereo stills camera, and suggested that I got a short end off the camera boys to load into empty 35mm cassettes, then after exposure give it to them to attach to a roll of film sent back to the UK for processing by Technicolor. Thus when the rushes came back, there was a positive print. I think the stock was Eastmancolor negative. Apparently this is a well known procedure as DoP’s will try some test shots with a Leica, using the stock for the main shoot. Ossie Morris (the DoP in this case) was happy to send in my shots under his name, bless him!

Pat

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