The Kodak Instamatic

My first introduction to photography came with a VP Twin - a small plastic camera sold by Woolworths until 1959 that took 127 roll film. They were messy to load were roll films - especially for a five-year-old. So a few years later I got a Christmas present of Kodak's brilliant new invention: the Instamatic.

The Instamatic 50 was launched in 1963 in the UK and was the first ever Instamatic camera taking Kodak's new format 126 film which came in a plastic cartridge that you just dropped into the back of the camera without having to be careful in case you got the film fogged by light. (In America the Instamatic 100 was the first model.) Controls were kept to a minimum. Top left is a metal bar that presses to take a picture. On the front is a sliding bar for taking pictures in bright sunshine or an overcast day. The setting for an overcast day could be used for flash photography - this requiring a separate flashgun that took little blue bulbs full of magnesium wire that when triggered exploded with a bright light that burned so hot the glass bulb melted and bubbled.

On the side of the camera was a lever for winding on the film. Unlike a roll film camera, where it was possible to be over-enthusiastic and wind the entire film by mistake, the camera used holes in the film to tell when enough film had been wound on and it then cocked the shutter and locked the lever so no film was wasted. Also the little triangle is the lever for opening the back of the camera for loading and unloading film cartridges. So a few photos from my Instamatic...

The very first photo I took with the camera some time in 1964 was this waterfall near Gisburn which was in Yorkshire at the time. In 1974 they decided it would be in Lancashire where it has been ever since, but I expect that a mini War of the Roses was in the offing at the time...

Every photo on that very first film had an interesting green stripe flanked by pink stripes either side, running horizontally along the bottom of the photo. It was probably caused by a bit of dust scratching the film...

Carnarvon Castle. It took many months to take a full film of 12 or 20 photos, mainly because it cost money to have them developed and printed. "That's enough now - save your film for something else..." The colour photos on this entry were taken on Kodachrome film which was a colour transparency (slides) film and the cost of the film included processing. The film cartridge came with an envelope for sending the exposed cartridge to Kodak's laboratories in Hemel Hempstead where it was processed, cut and the square images mounted in cardboard slide mounts printed with the month and year (sometimes so faint as to be invisible) and each slide numbered.

Also in Wales, these are the Swallow Falls at Betys-y-Coed. Taken in 1966 by my brother Frank (who would have taken any of these photos featuring me) it has the distinction of being the last photograph ever taken of me wearing short trousers. I was not allowed to wear long trousers until I was 13, whether for being dressed up or for everyday use. At 12 I was allowed a pair of jeans for play, but they were definitely not allowed for such formal things as meeting relatives or being taken to the shops etc.

Again courtesy of Frank here I am, aged 12 on holiday in Weston-Super-Mare, with a plastic battery-operated boat, knees that speak of having just been on the beach and foot stopping my football from rolling away. My mobile phone and tablet must have been in my pocket or held by Frank...

Blackpool, possibly during a day trip to see the Illuminations but it is possible this was an overnight or several nighter. It was September 1966 and I was 12½ here and starting to get to that awkward stage - "playing" was starting to come second to eyeing up the opposite sex.

The following year we were in Cheddar Gorge. You could probably take exactly the same photograph today - but it wouldn't have all those gorgeous 1960s cars in it!

Christmas dinner at my Grandma and Grandad Burke's house. Pictured L-R are half of Gt Auntie Elsie, my Grandma's sister, Gt-Gt Auntie Florrie, Gt Uncle Percy (Elsie's husband), Gt Grandma Brierley (mother to my Grandma Annie and Auntie Elsie) and Gt Auntie Cissie who was my Grandad's sister and called Mary really but she hated being called Mary as most people in Lancashire rhymed it with furry and she was always known as Cissie.

I have two abiding memories of Auntie Cissie from my younger days. One: that she had a tiny terraced house in Castleton, Rochdale that had an outdoor privy with a long drop to an open sewer 40 feet below. I was always petrified of falling down it and even getting to the privy meant pushing my way through tall stalks of what would have been magnificent rhubarb. Again at that age when it grows to above your head, you tend to remember it rather differently! Two: I loved tinned salmon (still do) but Auntie Cissie would never take the bones out, she believed they were good for you and just mashed them up so that you suddenly bit on a vertebrae or, worse, pierced the roof of your mouth with the pointy end of a fish rib... Ah the good old days...

They also brought out black and white film for the Instamatic and I got interested in developing and printing my own photos, which was both fun and very rewarding. The go-karts are at Heysham Head near Morecambe, a sort of fun park-cum-holiday park now long gone.

Margate, either 1966 or 67 I think. I wasn't as good at the time at labelling photos... We used to stay in a hotel in Cliftonville which had a half-sized snooker table in the lounge. Although perhaps my best memory of Margate has something to do with it being the place where I got my first brief cuddle with a young lady... Rosemary of Welwyn Garden City... Never to be seen again...

Also never to be seen again are the station buildings at Milnrow Railway Station. Once a stop on the line from Rochdale to Manchester Victoria it is now a tram halt with the platforms decorated so I am told by simple shelters. I remember it with a ticket master, station master and waiting rooms that would have roaring warm fires in winter. Progress...

And I'll finish with a photo that I can date to the exact day. The Avro Vulcan at the very first Woodford Air Show, 29 June 1968. The photo shows just how close the public were allowed to get to aircraft.

Blackpool Air Show Sunday 9 Aug 2015

Yesterday saw us down in Blackpool for the first of a two-day air show. Weather could have been better, but it remained dry and at times patches of blue came through the clouds, but cloud base remained fairly low and many of the photos would have benefited from a touch of sunshine. On saying that, my head did take on a certain red soreness by the end of the afternoon...

First up was the Typhoon - I still think of it as the Eurofighter. This put on a superb show with lots of opportunities for taking shots like this with the twin engines glowing from the afterburners.

It looked even better when it started to turn and the air condensed as water was squeezed out of it, forming mist and vapour trails.

Conditions were not ideal for taking photographs due to the low light levels coupled with the speed at which aircraft travel meaning several photos were a touch blurred. But I did take quite a few so there are enough to go round!

We were sitting on the steps leading down to the beach just south of the North Pier. Cones and a security cordon kept the beach clear of onlookers who might otherwise have strayed a little too close to passing aircraft. It's been an unfortunate year indeed for air shows with a number of incidents in recent weeks. Happily Sunday's show went ahead without mishap. (Monday's is going ahead as I write - a helicopter clattered over the house half an hour ago and I can now hear jet engine noise.)

The Extra EA-260 is a hand-built aerobatic plane designed by Walter Extra which is a name any manufacturer would want on the payroll. Project behind time? Put a bit of Extra into it! This thing can roll a full 360 degrees in a second. Great to watch but it doesn't photograph well...

The BAC Strikemaster, jet trainer and light attack aircraft. An armed version of the Jet Provost, they were mainly used as trainers, but some were deployed on active duty. They first flew in 1967.

The Breitling Wingwalkers are a team of very brave young ladies who take it upon themselves to stand on top of a couple of biplanes hurtling about the sky at 150mph and doing synchronised poses such as high kicks and stuff. In the old days wingwalkers would perform without tethering themselves to the aircraft with some even walking off the wing of one aircraft onto another. This practice quickly fell off though...

Even so, you need a certain amount of nerve to do this and performing in a 150mph gale is not for ninnies!

"Pull up! Pull up!!!"

This is what many people had come to see. The Avro Vulcan's last tour of the North West before it is retired. The ultimate V-Bomber, operational through the Cold War and the aircraft that famously flew down to bomb the runaway at Port Stanley during the Falklands War.

The THRUM! of those jet engines in your chest as you watch is to be savoured! We used to have a ceramic-coated metal scale model on a plinth when I was a teenager. With a wingspan of around 12 inches it would probably be worth a fortune now. It got thrown out at some point unknown...

I remember well in the early days of Ebay when the dilapidated Vulcan from outside Blackpool Airport quickly gained bids of several million pounds before it was pointed out that all armaments had been stripped out and that it wouldn't fly... Wouldn't move at all in fact - it had to be taken to bits on site.

The RotorSport Calidus autogyro. They look great fun but I'm not sure you could coax me into one unless there were twenty of you with cattle prods...

They take two people sitting tandem style in the tiny cockpit and are highly manoeuvrable. Bizarrely the wikipedia website says they can be fitted with navigation lights for night flying - but that night flying is not allowed...

I used to love the air shows of the sixties and seventies which were always full of Spitfires doing their thing. After TV shots of them flying in swarms earlier in the year this was a rather disappointing showing with only one Spit from the Battle of Britain Memorial flight and which seemed to me to stay well away from the audience, making close-up photos impossible.

The Chinook helicopter is an awesome sight. The blooming thing just chunkered over my house whilst I was writing about the Vulcan a bit ago too - I had to stop and make sure none of my teeth were going to rattle loose... The only aircraft of the day to - literally - take a bow! Show-off!

Aw... that's nice! The RV8tors fly a pair of RV-8 aircraft (you see what they did there...?) which are highly manoeuvrable and skid about at 230mph. This is the climax of their display when the two planes each create half of a heart with their smoke trails.

When this appeared I was wracking my brains trying to think what it was. It had a bit of the look of a Feisler, but their best-known model, the Storch, had high wings on a level with the top of the cockpit... It turned out to be a Bűcker Bestmann. If you watch The Great Escape and can tear yourself from the scene where Steve McQueen jumps the fence on a motorbike, concentrate instead on James Garner and Donald Pleasance, who nick one of these and fly back into the hands of the Germans. Oh sorry - I should have said "spoiler alert"...

The Red Arrows have had a bit of a grotty weekend with technical problems. A couple of displays at Belfast and Newcastle had to be cancelled due to the requirement that pilots after a leave must conduct a practice with nine aircraft. Faults were eventually fixed and a practice held, but then an instrument check on one aircraft meant that it had to be pulled again and the Blackpool show went ahead with only eight aircraft. Due to cloud cover this was a flat (flattish) display but the 70,000 strong crowd were making plenty of appreciative noise!

It was madness after the display ended. We had gone down to Blackpool by bus but with so many people heading for public transport we decided to just set off and walked back to Bispham along the cliffs. A good afternoon!

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Blackpool Air Display 2009

Today there was an air show over the sea between the South and Central piers. I went down there with my trusty camera - eventually after thinking it would as usual be between the Central and North piers...

Topping the bill as usual were the Red Arrows, the RAF display team. First however there were a lot more things to do and see.

Several thousand people for one thing. A Promenade still cordoned off for building work for another. I did stand on the North Pier for a bit but it soon became obvious I wasn't going to see much from there so I set off walking down towards the Central Pier. Which meant walking on the tram tracks really.

Whilst I was still walking, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight gave their display. This was one of the main attractions for me and my view was somewhat limited by railings and fencing, trams going past and people's heads - duh, if 5 foot four inches is good enough for me, it should be good enough for everyone...

Anyway I managed to get one or two shots but the aircraft, flying out over the sea seemed a long way away.

Also the sun sets in the west and at Blackpool the sea is to the west, so having an air display late afternoon over the sea means squinting against the sun and hence a few photos are a bit like silhouettes I'm afraid. They should have it in the morning!

By the time I got down onto the beach just south of the Central Pier there was a wing walking display going on. There wasn't a lot of walking going on actually as she looked to be fairly well fastened to one spot. But she did wave cheerfully and managed to hide the sick bag until the plane had gone past and she had her back to us. Rather her than me. I mean... wouldn't do a thing for my hair!

And then... oh, fabulous! A Vulcan bomber did just two fly-past runs. Those things must suck in fuel at a rate my car can only aspire to, so whilst brief, the Vulcan display might well have been amongst the more costly of the displays of the afternoon. But what a magnificent sight.

I used to have a mate who, during the Cold War, had to sleep under one of these in readiness for being woken up to go and drop atom bombs on Russia. And you think you are stressed at work?

Then a four-aircraft aerobatic display, The Blades. Apparently they are all ex-Red Arrow pilots and they did give a superb display.

But now it was time for the real thing.

The past few times I've seen the Red Arrows there has been low cloud and they had to do a low-level display to avoid being invisible to the audience for much of the time. No such problems this afternoon and we had a superb display, well worth the long walk from the car park.

It took me an hour to walk back afterwards with an incredible amount of people all wanting to either get back home or head back to a hotel for their evening meal. A bit like Blackpool of old! I came over all proud!

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