Since we’ve moved here, there’s been a lot of ‘devanprint’ or even ‘devanscan’ going on in our home. I don’t know if it’s one of those ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ things and the Rodinal’s sojourn in a Pickfords depot somewhere in the South of England has made him pine for the smell of processing chemicals but whatever the reason, he’s been very active in the film department of late.

Strangely, the bathroom light fitting has become the place to hang the film, while it’s drying. Over the weeks, I’ve been looking up at it while in the bath (or elsewhere if you get my drift) and thinking ‘ooohhh look, film’. It’s made me quite reminiscent of my ‘rock chick photographer’ days in the early 80s, poring over negs and deciding how to tell the processor (I never did my own printing) what to crop and how I wanted the print to look.

I NEVER look back on my film days with any kind of positive nostalgia other than for being in the thick of the gig scene and shooting my heroes while onstage or off, I just thought of film as a complete pain in the bum. By the time I’d got my film developed and printed, I could never remember what I’d done to get a good shot or conversely what I’d done when something didn’t work out. For me the only thing to ‘celebrate’ was when I got a film back with something special on it like this Joe Strummer pic. I did have aspirations of scanning all my old rock gig pics and turning them into a book, along with my gig diaries of the day, though I’ve never got round to it because, let’s face it, scanning is as dull an exercise as I can think of and I’ve always got more interesting things in the here and now than scanning and post-processing.

I only posted the Joe Strummer pic on pbase because I was boasting to David about how my Clash/Joe Strummer pics were miles better than the shots printed in the NME tribute edition after he died. He didn’t believe me (he thinks I’m a fairly crap photographer and he’s right) so I fished out the negs and said ‘ha – take a look at this lot then’. When he scanned a few, he was agog – he couldn’t believe they were ‘my’ pics and he got quite excited by the fact that there was a whole boxful of shots of other wonderful bands from the era – including U2, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and a whole load of lesser-known acts. I took his scan of my pic and posted it just because it was there and he’d done the work to scan it for me. Maybe when I run out of new projects and have nothing better to do, I may just revitalise that project. I still reckon it’d make a cracker of a book.

For me, digital opened up a whole new world, one where I could tell where I went wrong, if I did go wrong, through the exif data – it doesn’t stop me making howling clangers even now but at least if I do, I can usually analyse why for myself.

He, on the other hand, loves film with a passion and won’t hear a word said against it. He carts around an assortment of film cameras everywhere, from the tiny Mju, bought recently for a song on ebay, to the huge and very unwieldy Rolleicord that was a gift for his 40th birthday from his parents. He’s so perverse he experiments with processing colour film with Rodinal, B&W on C41 and all sorts of weird and wonderful scanning and printing processes.

So, I’m destined to spend my life ducking under film when I go in the bathroom. I wonder what’s on this one???

Last year a corny and at the same time sexy device for a thank-you to Andy - yum!