February 2026 — Frozen in Time
A 52 Week Photography Challenge
Chapter 1: Frozen in Time
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
I was 12 or 13 years old when I bought my first record player. It was a Realistic brand, from Radio Shack. Extremely lo-fi — but it was all I could afford with the paper route money. It meant that I could lounge in my bedroom to listen to music instead of playing it on the family console in the living room, which was sure to face scrutiny and judgement from family.
Most of my records at that time were older rock like CCR, ZZ Top, Black Sabbath and such. At school the next day I was telling someone (I forget his name … I suppose it was someone I wanted to impress) about my new stereo and he asked what I listened to. I blurted out “Pink Floyd”. I have no idea why I did that. Clearly my brain had miss-fired. I had never listened to Pink Floyd. I don’t even know how I knew the name of the band. He asked what my favourite song was and all I could mumble was “…umm… I like all of them…”. He laughed, punched me in the gut, told me I was a loser, and walked away.
The punch didn’t really hurt, but I was totally humiliated. I had been caught in a lie and it haunted me for the rest of that day. Like most teenagers I cared way too much about what others thought of me.
After school I took the bus over to the local shopping mall and found the record store where I bought my first Pink Floyd album, The Dark Side of the Moon. I got home and rushed to my room to put it on expecting music that I was used to, stuff they played on FM radio or that I had heard before, maybe traditional rock or pop or something. And then this sound started. Was it a heartbeat? Is something wrong with the turntable? By the time the music started I was completely captivated. I had never heard anything like this before — the synth, the orchestration, the way one song just sort of flowed into the next. Strange instruments, people talking… what is this I thought to myself. I listened to both sides then flipped the album over to side 1 and played it again. Eventually someone came in to get me for dinner. If I recall correctly it was about the time the clocks and bells are going off at the start of the song Time, or maybe it was when the vocals in The Great Gig in the Sky were reaching a climax.
“what are you listening to?”
“oh nothing — just a new album I bought”
“it sounds like noise … are you coming for dinner …”
I’ll never forget that day, the album, the lyrics and the instrumentation. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It was when I really started to actually listen to music. For me, this moment is Frozen in Time.
About the image: this is a photo darkroom print. The clock tower was somewhere in London, and the ice from a frozen pond on a mountain near where I live. The print was made using two enlargers, one for each negative. The photo paper was exposed to each image and then developed. The timing took a bit of fiddling but no dodging or burning was required.
Chapter 2: Endless Highway
Since we are talking about songs, I think I’ll keep that theme alive. The Endless Highway is of course a metaphor for life, that it goes on, that things change over time and we don’t really know what is around the next corner. Adversity, challenge, discovery, learning, and eventually death.
There are so many songs that take up this theme. The first one that springs to mind is Life is a Highway, by Tom Cochrane. Not my song. Overplayed and a bit too cliché, in my opinion. Maybe Running Down a Dream, by Tom Petty? Better, still overplayed, but a great driving tune on a sunny day as you blast down a long, straight highway, with no other cars in sight!
Speaking of driving tunes, I particularly like Tom Waits Diamonds On My Windshield. The version from the album The Heart of Saturday Night. It starts like this …
Well these diamonds on my windshield
And these tears from heaven
Well I’m pulling into town on the Interstate
I got a steel train in the rain
And the wind bites my cheek through the wing
And it’s these late nights and this freeway flying
It always makes me sing
The song does not have the punch and enthusiasm of Mr. Petty’s tune — but the bass line sucks you in and the lyrics get in your head and won’t leave you alone for days. This song really stimulates the nostalgia centre in my brain. It makes me want to rush out and buy a 1963 Anything and cruise aimlessly up and down the strip looking for something to do, but not really looking for something to do if you know what I mean.
Chapter 3: Faceless Portrait
Nostalgia. It’s a strange thing. A feeling rather than an idea. It’s probably an emotion — I’m not sure. Nostalgia is nice. It makes one feel good. It centres you. It makes you yearn for times gone by. Of course I know you can never go back, but it is comforting nonetheless.
So what makes a photograph (or image, painting etc) nostalgic?
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Maybe it is the subject matter, something familiar and from the past, something that conjures up pleasant memories. Take this photo for example. It makes me feel calm. It revives memories from long ago, even though the photo was taken just last summer. It somehow reminds me of days gone by, of afternoons with friends, talking and laughing, living life and not worrying about a thing. It also makes me want to stop writing and head out to the pub for a pint! A familiar scene, that must be important.
By the way, I don’t know the folks in this picture — I cannot even remember the pub. We were visiting London and decided that we needed to visit a new pub each day. Walking around with a camera is exhausting work — and certainly entitles one to a pint or two of good English ale.
Maybe it is the colour and lighting that triggers the nostalgia? Incandescent lights, maybe the yellow and blue tones? The colour in this image is ‘as shot’, on expired Fuji Provia 400, digitized using a Sony mirrorless on a copy stand (my only use for the expensive Sony camera, which I loath and never should have bought). Well the colour and tone certainly helps. If I alter the colour (white balance) the image fails and just ends up looking like some random travel pic. Colour matters.
I suspect that it is also the use of film … the grain and the imperfections. Texture. It does something, maybe gives the sense of oldness, of imperfection — and this is somehow comforting. It’s strange how we tend to remember the past in a more positive light than it really was. That night on the town was epic, but who remembers the next day?
Oh, if you are wondering, the blur at the top of the image was created in camera with a bit of ICM. This is actually a double exposure, the first shot being a quick left to right sweep of some memorabilia on the wall at a slow shutter speed. The second shot was the scene itself.
The subject of the Faceless Portrait? Is it the dude at the bar? The bartender? Is she sad? Is she bored? Is she thinking of her lover? Or is the subject the woman in the poster? Maybe it is simply a portrait of a glass of beer.
Chapter 4: Contact
Well the house is on fire and I’m burning inside
Ain’t got no work ’cause there’s no work to find
Sitting here alone, I got nothing to do
And I’m in this back room with these black dog blues
Lyrics from Black Dog Blues by Russel Morris.
I admit that I was tempted to lead with …
Hey-hey, mama, said the way you move
Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove
But that would be a bit too expected. Better to dredge something up from my personal Blues era. There have been other eras too, Alternative, Punk, Americana, Folk, Metal, Hip Hop — even Pop (which I’d rather forget!). But I digress.
What does this have to do with Contact? Let me explain…
I pondered this prompt for quite some time. At first I was hell bent on contact printing an old negative, maybe a cyanotype or something. I couldn’t think of a good image though, certainly nothing I wanted to break out the Potassium Ferricyanide for. I know, Potassium Ferricyanide sounds evil, but it’s not. Not really. I mean I wouldn’t drink it, but I don’t think it will hurt you any more than spending hours sitting at the keyboard.
Anyway, I went to bed without a plan. I woke the next morning and everything was fuzzy. Oh for fuck’s sake. Once again I had forgotten to take out my contact lenses.
A few minutes later the brain wakes up completely …hey, maybe I can should take a picture using a contact lens. I stumbled to the bathroom to get the shrivelled plastic discs out of my eyes. Finally a plan!
The rest of the day was spent trying to source a suitable contact lens. I wanted an old ‘hard’ contact, maybe with a +3 prescription. The idea was to mount it onto a clear lens filter in front of a generic lens on an SLR. I looked online, I went in to a couple optometrist shops — but could not find what I needed. Apparently they don’t really make ‘hard’ contact lenses anymore. I could order a Gas Permeable lens which is sort of hard, but they are expensive and would take weeks to arrive. It was quite annoying because I had this idea of hundreds of old hard contacts sitting unused in people drawers… but they may as well have been on Mars as I had no way of getting them.
In the end I gave up looking for the perfect lens, and simply took one of my disposable contacts and placed it carefully on the camera filter. It stuck there as it was wet. It even retained its shape and did not slide around! I decided to use the Nikon F80 because I knew I had to work fast before the lens dried out, and this camera is the fastest (to use) SLR I have. It even has built in metering and autofocus (which really didn’t help for this project!).
When I got outside I realized that I had been so totally consumed with the contact lens that I had not considered what I would use as a subject, so I took a couple selfies (yes, with an 50mm lens on an SLR. Luckily the contact moved the focal point closer — so it sort of worked). Then I took a couple Pictures of Lily (the super sweet and cuddly black lab border collie cross who lives with us) before walking down the street to shoot some backlit Douglas Fir trees. That was all I got before the contact dried up and glued itself to the lens filter.
The image was shot on Ilford HP5+ film and developed in Blazinal (a Rodinal clone developer), and well, that is how I took this image. I like it. The surrealistic vibe with the black dog, symbolic of impending doom, and maybe more than apropos for the times in which we live.
It was a fun month for photos! Thank you to Full Frame and the editors for hosting this challenge. It adds some focus to my photo journey, and I enjoy it immensely.
And in keeping with my self-imposed music theme I’ll sign off with some lyrics from Corb Lund’s Expectation and the Blues…
So as I walk out into the sunlight to face the music
And leave the casino behind me in the dark
I know in my heart the things we see around us in the world today are a mess
But it’s not all our fault, so hey
