@vandyke4ad@RickGaehl Here's a dawn picture I did bother to travel to and get up for. As with all pictures of this location, the picture is crap and gives no idea of what it's actually like to be there. (Tour guide: "yeah, I know it means getting up in the middle of the night, but it's so much less crowded than sunset and you lot are all still jetlagged anyway so you won't care.")
It's phenomenally difficult to take a picture of the Taj that isn't the same as the pictures every other single tourist takes. These are my efforts one is a reflection of the Taj in the long pond in front of it and the other was a body washed up on the banks of the river behind the Taj - god it stank!
The body in the river behind the Taj was an extraordinary juxtaposition between what is probably the world's most beautiful tomb and what is the humble way a body can be returned through the beaks of vultures and crows!
@Paulos_the_fog@vandyke4ad@RickGaehl I did take some pictures of the Taj from the other side of the river but can't immediately find them, presumably because I never got round to scanning those particular slides from 1984.
I ended up dumping most of the 100s of slides I took in India as after years of storage, when I got them out to scan them - fungus had got to them and most were quite badly degraded and therefore not worth scanning!
I did learn two, now fairly irrelevant, bits of information. I had a Canon T90 at the time and I was offered up to 10 times what it was worth in the UK. Most of the offers were likely scams but some were probably for real as sophisticated cameras were subject to 1000% import tax back then.
In that era (1988) colour slide film was almost completely unavailable in India - certainly the Kodachrome I used for most purposes back then was totally unavailable. However, I managed to find a few cassettes of various sorts of Ektachrome most of which were out of date! I wished I had taken 10 times the amount of film with me!
@Paulos_the_fog@TimWardCam@vandyke4ad
Fungus is a real problem with slide film. I've lost hundreds of shots to it as well. On the whole, I'm glad to have gone digital. It's so much easier to store, file and index photos than it was in the old days.
Indeed! I'm sure there is a way to store transparencies that protects them from fungal degradation but whatever it is, clearly, I didn't do it!
I met a photographer over in India who was trekking around India with around 1000 cassettes of Kodachrome in several lead lined sacks to avoid them being fogged going through airport x-ray machines. He made a living selling photos via picture libraries. Interestingly, back then most picture libraries would only accept Kodachrome for 35mm submissions!
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