© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Monthly Archives: November 2019

Read more about the article Ray Standen’s Newcastle earthquake video

Ray Standen’s Newcastle earthquake video

Back around Christmas 1989, Islington man Ray Standen, 64, was making a video in Hamilton. It was a jolly yuletide film about the suburb - and particularly the shopping strip of Beaumont Street - preparing for Christmas and New Year celebrations. Ray had made video his hobby about three years before, after he'd suffered a heart attack and stroke, and he credited the hobby with helping him find a reason to keep living. (My source for this information is an article by Mike Scanlon, in The Newcastle Herald. I'm afraid I don't know the date of…

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Read more about the article Our Town Revisited: Newcastle in colour with a focus on the 1970s

Our Town Revisited: Newcastle in colour with a focus on the 1970s

This is the Newcastle that I remember from my own younger days. And this is the most personal of our books to date, peppered with fragmentary anecdotes of my memories of growing up in Our Town. My unrequited wish to go on Romper Room, for example. And of course my still-jarring memories of the 1989 earthquake - the 30th anniversary of which coincides with the production of this book. Newcastle's East End, late 1970s. Photo by Ron Morrison. For the past decade, Sylvia and I have produced a collection of historical photographs each year. It started…

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Read more about the article Tintypes: oddities in the family album
A tiny photo album, with even tinier tintype portraits.

Tintypes: oddities in the family album

Many older family photo albums and collections of family snapshots contain mysterious little pictures printed on thin plates of metal. These "tintypes" - also sometimes called ferrotypes - were a relatively common means of producing quick and cheap portraits in years long gone by. Tintypes were direct positives produced on thin sheets of enamelled or lacquered metal coated with photosensitive emulsion. Tintype of a small girl, circa late 1800s. Tintypes reached their peak in the 1870s and were extremely popular with travelling photographers because they could be developed and fixed within minutes. Tintype of two children,…

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