In Search of Sepia…

It’s not that I particularly like sepia – in fact, give me good ol’ black and white anytime. Or colour. But I belong to a small group of very sympa photographers and friends who get together in Menton and the surrounding villages to  recreate the past in images of life as it was once lived. At the moment, we are ‘in the 1920s’ when sepia was still in use. In film photography, it was a chemical process carried out on silver-based photographic prints and had the advantage of being more resistant to the degradation of time. However, during the first decades of the 20th century this type of printing was being used less and less and by the 1930s had ended.

There are ways of re-creating the sepia look in digital photography from a fairly straightfoward change of colour and tone to the using of a pre-set that makes the image look like a damaged and faded postcard.

Here is a 1920s wedding that took place in the village of Gorbio last Sunday!  The family pose under Gorbio’s 300 plus year old elm tree.