Girton at 150

At the end of June, Girton College celebrated its 150th birthday with a weekend festival of events.  I spent the Sunday at the festival with Harriet, listening to the talks and taking a few pictures.

The first event I attended was by Clive Oppenheimer, Professor of Volcanology at the University Geography Department (i.e. one of Harriet's colleagues).  The talk concentrated on his collaboration with Werner Herzog in the making of Into the Inferno - a film about volcanos commissioned by Netflix.

The main hall on the college had been decorated with bicycles covered in garlands of flowers, and very good it looked too.

While 2019 is the 150th anniversary of the college's foundation, it's also the 40th anniversary of admitting men as undergraduates.  I remember this event very well as it happened during my third year at Downing college, and I knew several of the male "pioneers".  Dr Roland Randall - another colleague of Harriet's - was one of the first male fellows at the college, and he chaired a fascinating discussion about the trials and tribulations of an institution becoming co-educational.  Incidentally, Downing went co-ed in 1980, the year after I graduated, so I missed all the fun.

The final talk I attended related to two Greenland expeditions, over thirty years apart.  The first, run jointly by Cambridge University and Imperial College London in 1963, managed to climb - and name - many of the mountains on the Stauning Alps.  One of the peaks was named after Girton, and a second expedition from the college in 1998 set out to re-visit it.  The two speakers were Professor Mike Graham and Dr Fiona Cooke, who were on the first and second expeditions respectively.

Avid readers of this blog (are there any?) will remember my adventures a few weeks ago, re-photographing the images to be used in the "Girton Peak" talks.

Friday Challenge

Harriet set me a challenge on Friday.  No, not going to Waitrose in order to buy some dinner (although this was on the list too), but to copy some archive pictures relating to two expeditions to "Girton Peak" in North East Greenland.  The first was in 1963, when a group of intrepid explorers named the Peak after the College; and the second was a return visit to the Peak in the 1990s by members of the College.  2019 is Girton's 150th anniversary, and Dr Fiona Cooke (a member of the second expedition) will be presenting a talk on 30th June as part of the Girton 150 Festival - hence the need for digital copies of the images.

The earlier images came in the form of faded, half-toned prints in a contemporary type-written report, with the rest being on 35mm transparencies (remember those?).  Since I expected the slides to be more straightforward than the prints, I decided to tackle them first.  How wrong could I be?  Plan A was to use an old-fashioned lightbox, but the fluorescent tubes it contained interfered badly with the digital sensor.  Plan B was to use my iPad as a "digital lightbox", and this was a great idea in principle.  The only downside was that the Fujinon 80/2.8 macro lens is so bleeping sharp that it was capable resolving the individual RGB pixels on the iPad's Retina screen.  Clearly I needed to separate the slide from the light source, and a couple of old-fashioned slide box lids proved ideal for this.  Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

Note the use of an item which is essential in any photographer's toolbox: beer!

For reference, this is what happened when I laid the slide directly on the iPad "lightbox".  At full size there are horrendous Moiré patterns caused by sampling interference between the camera and iPad; zooming in clearly shows the RGB pixels from which the high dot-pitch Retina screen is constructed.

The final scanned slide, showing Fiona Cooke, along with another from the set.

The prints were relatively straightforward to copy in comparison to the slides, once I'd worked out a way of holding the report flat without destroying the 56-year-old document (who knew that kebab skewers would turn out to be so useful?).

Walkies

Being a week after Isla's second set of injections, Saturday was "Walkies Day".  We were warned by the vet about an outbreak of Parvovirus, to which young pups are particularly vulnerable until their immunity is established.  The advice was to avoid places where people normally walk their dogs.  Working on the assumption that this is pretty well everywhere, we decided to combine a trip to Girton College for Harriet with our first real walk in the grounds.

We needn't have worried about Isla in the big wide world, though, since she took to it like - well - like a labrador to walkies.

She clearly has the "pack" instinct, as she became very hesitant as soon as one of us (usually me with a camera) held back for any length of time.

We're limited to 15 minutes per day at the moment, but at least Isla will now be able to work off some of that energy which has been building up.  The daily dog walks are the main thing I've missed after losing Amber last October, and I can't wait to re-establish them.  It will be a little while before we're able to go for a ten-mile stomp, unfortunately, but I was always told that patience is a virtue.