I have selected this image for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I have started to digitise my old Kodachrome slides and BW film negatives which date back to my days as a geology undergraduate student at Swansea University (Prifysgol Abertawe) in the city of Swansea in South Wales when I first started to become interested in photography.
I bought my first SLR camera with money from my grandparents for my 18th Birthday in 1978, just before I started at university. It was a secondhand secondhand Praktica Nova B SLR with a standard Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f2.8 lens. At the end of my first year I landed a well-paid summer job as a labourer (I was actually a “‘chippie’s mate”) on a construction site, and after much research into various camera makes and functions, in late August 1979 I spent a chunk of my earnings (£309-20p to be precise) on my first Nikon SLR – a Nikon FE with a standard Nikkor f1.8 lens.
Throughout the year I used my camera to record geology field trips and student life in general. Come June, most regular lectures finished due to exams etc., but at the end of the second year in Geology there were a few local field trips but not much else happening other than drinking in the pubs and bars on the Mumbles and planning for our major individual field trips for our final dissertations. Consequently if the weather was fine we’d be spending our days on the beach or cycling out onto the nearby Gower Peninsular, which in 1956 had become the first area in the UK to be officially designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. But one morning I decided on a change of plan.
I had read that the famed Welsh poet, playwright and author Dylan Thomas had often frequented the docks as a teenager when bunking off from school, and as the docks were just down the road I thought that I would go and explore there.
The late 1970’s were not a great time for the economy of South Wales. The heavy industries of steel and coal were past their heyday, with much of the infrastructure looking the worse for wear due to the lack of investment. The docks looked particularly desolate as the steel and coal exports had seriously declined, and the docks had not adapted to containerisation. Many of the wharves and warehouses were desolate and in various stages of demolition (see Image of the Month for March 2022), and I was able to freely wander around and explore without challenge.
I did however find one working area, where some dockside cranes were finishing unloading a small freighter, alongside another freighter that was loading up with scrap steel for export to India. (I was briefly challenged by some of the dock workers though, who asked me not to point a camera in the direction of one fellow in particular, as “he may be wanted elsewhere”!)
So I took a number of photos of workers unloading what appeared to be bales of cotton, cylinders of aluminium, and other boxed gooads which was then loaded onto a couple of railway wagons pulled by a small dockyard Class 08 diesel shunter, (a class affectionately known on the railways as a “Gronk“).
Lioke most people, I never really appreciated the pace of change that was upon us all at the time. With hindsight whilst reviewing my negatives, I wish now that I had taken many, many more photos of the docks that day, but at the time, a complete roll of film (36 exposures) seemed more than enough, and difficult to justify spending (wasting?) more money on a second roll of film that was just a very dull series of images of a dilapidated dockyard. With digital we take for granted how easy and cheap it is to take several hundred photographs, where we can instantly check the exposure settings, and be confident that we have correctly captured the images we want. But looking back at the images, that sunny day in June 1980 seems a lifetme ago, so much more than a mere 44 years!
I was pleased with this image, both the composition and the digitization process, but also the preservation of the negative. It would have been developed in Ilford ID-11 or Ilfosol, with a ‘stop bath’ of bog-standard household vinegar probably (I was a cheap skate), and ‘Fixed’ in a standard Ilford Fixer. I must have got it reasonably correct back in 1980! As for the digitisation, the image has minimal grain, and is acceptably sharp. The major advantage in the digitized version though is that I can selectively manage the highlights and shadows in Photoshop much more selectively and accurately than in a conventional darkroom, and digitally remove any dust spots and scratches etc from the negative – which means that producing the final edited image saves a fortune on wasted photographic paper and chemicals, as well as time.
By and large I am quite pleased with this image – firstly it is an interesting record of a lost way of life in the docks, and secondly it represents a proof of method for the task ahead of me, for digitizing several thousand more BW negatives and Kodachrome slides transparencies.
I sent a copy of this and several other digitised images of the docks to the Swansea & Port Talbot Docks History website, who were most grateful for them, as apparently they very few old images of actual dock operations. I just wish that I had shot a few more rolls of film on that sunny day all those years ago.