Here, offered as an antidote to the rush of announcements of new new new things, are some old things ...
First ... Horsetail, a primitive plant that survives from the Paleozoic era and propagates by spores ... so they've been around for about 500 million years ... I've been photographing this clump for a few months now ...
Here we have some rock strata ... perhaps a geologist will come along to identify these for us, but they look like shale and some sort of sediment, and I photographed this on the "Jurassic Coast" of Dorset ... so perhaps a couple of hundred million years old ... that's right, the horsetail has been around longer ...
and lastly, a nice bit of seaweed ... well not so nice actually because I've just discovered it's Wireweed (Sargassum muticum) and is an invasive species native to Japanese waters rather than here ... so probably not so old, though it looks nicely primitive ...
... rather appropriately, these photographs are also about to become fossils, as the film with which they were captured (Adox CHS 25, also known as Efke KB25) has recently ceased production. It was an old-fashioned (pre-WWII) emulsion formula, very slow (25 ASA) and fine-grained, manufactured until about three weeks ago on machinery made between WWI and WWII; also appropriately, I made the photographs using lenses designed before WWII, and developed the film in a developer first formulated in the 1890s ...
First ... Horsetail, a primitive plant that survives from the Paleozoic era and propagates by spores ... so they've been around for about 500 million years ... I've been photographing this clump for a few months now ...
Here we have some rock strata ... perhaps a geologist will come along to identify these for us, but they look like shale and some sort of sediment, and I photographed this on the "Jurassic Coast" of Dorset ... so perhaps a couple of hundred million years old ... that's right, the horsetail has been around longer ...
and lastly, a nice bit of seaweed ... well not so nice actually because I've just discovered it's Wireweed (Sargassum muticum) and is an invasive species native to Japanese waters rather than here ... so probably not so old, though it looks nicely primitive ...
... rather appropriately, these photographs are also about to become fossils, as the film with which they were captured (Adox CHS 25, also known as Efke KB25) has recently ceased production. It was an old-fashioned (pre-WWII) emulsion formula, very slow (25 ASA) and fine-grained, manufactured until about three weeks ago on machinery made between WWI and WWII; also appropriately, I made the photographs using lenses designed before WWII, and developed the film in a developer first formulated in the 1890s ...