Hodgsonites 1977 Hodgsonites as seen by Simon Perutz (H '77)

Amongst our number is Simon Perutz (H '77). Although, a fraction younger
than me, we overlapped and were both major
users of the photographic dark room below the stairs in Studio. Here we
developed our black and white prints onto Fuji paper in the light
sensitive world of chemicals and fixer, experimenting with sepia tones
and exposure times. With our cameras, we experimented with fish-eye and
wide-angle lenses and depths of field. A key moment in our photographic
career came when Simon's Dad donated three or four brand new Pentax
Single Lens Reflex Cameras called SP 500s to Brian Souter to place in a
draw for the users of dark room. I was lucky enough to win one which I
used all the way into my metal career, taking photos of stockpiles of
scrap Titanium in the Former Soviet Union, until I mistakenly lent the
camera to a friend who left it on a plane coming back from Estonia. The
SP 500 was something really special, it was (as far as I know) the only
camera then being sold to the public with a shutter speed of a five
hundredth of a second and we were told that there was a unmarked notch
which if used was one thousandth of a second (but not then reliable
enough to be commercially guaranteed or advertised). Such things, young
teenage Carthusians, such as Simon and me, found highly exciting.
Simon's career at school, as witnessed in some of the photos in the
Flikr files accessed by the url below, overlapped with the visit of the
Queen and Duke of Edinburgh in 1972, as well as the Centenary of the
school's move to Godalming in 1872, which coincidentally was also the
birth date of Ralph Vaughan Williams. That summer, preparing for the
celebrations, Simon and I, found ourselves in the large room on the left
as you enter Studio which had been converted into an impromptu dark
room, developing a huge print about 12' x 12' of the great man which was
to be used as one of the display items for Music School. It seemed to
take many hours as the print gradually unfurled and revealed itself from
a massive trough of developer fluid as we listened to the music of
'Chicago'.

You may see the now anthropological and historic black and white
pictures that Simon took between '73 and '77 by clicking by becoming a friend on Facebook or at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonperutz/sets/

If you would like files for any of the pictures you can email him at simon@nimlok.com
Remarkable.

Anthony Lipmann (H '75)