I was a student in Leeds from 1965 to 1970, I took City and Guilds Industrial and Commercial Photography at intermediate and final level.
I was at college one day and one evening and in the daytime I worked for a firm of commercial photographers in Park Square, Leeds.
We photographed 3-piece suits of furniture for a furniture maker in Leeds (my boss was a bit slapdash and didn’t comb the fringe along the bottom of the furniture so we had to have the print retouched and then copied1).
We also photographed electrical switchgear for a manufacturer in Meanwood, Leeds, these prints were also retouched1 to give the light grey metal cases a smooth finish.
Another client was a building company, we did progress photography of tall office buildings in Park Row, Leeds. I did not have a good head for heights and one day my boss and I went right up to the top of the building, which was open at the sides, just slabs with supports, we went up a series of ladders. My boss had the Linhof 5x4 technical camera2 on the Linhof tripod2 on his shoulder and I had the big case with the dark slides, filters etc. We were almost at the top (I was green and the wind was howling through) when the boss turned round and put a scaffolding post through the ground glass focusing screen, the builders found it hilarious! We had to go all the way back down and come back another day.
Leeds was known as the Motorway City of the 70s and we had the contract to photograph the street lighting in the tunnels. My boss got the exposure wrong and all the light fittings, which is what the client wanted to see, were burnt out. I had to burn each one in under the enlarger (dodging) and managed to get a good print. The client ordered 100 10”x8” prints (before the advent of A sizes).
One day we went to photograph a foundry in Leeds, that was a really scary place, there were overhead rails with huge containers of molten metal on, they never stopped so when you saw one coming you had to duck into little cut-outs in the wall and face away whilst they slowly went past, the heat was very strong.
Park Square was the city of the legal area of Leeds and we used to photograph accident victims for court cases. One day my boss’s car was in for service and he asked if I would go and collect the subject in my Austin A35 van. When I got there the solicitor asked to come too. I had put seats in the back of my van, old cinema seats, with a length of 2 x 1 wood across and brass door bolts to hold them in place. I had been in a crash where someone ran into the back of me and my driver’s seat had collapsed, so I had a five gallon chemical3 container wedged behind my seat. The solicitor sat astride it in his posh suit.
If away from a darkroom we would take up to twelve 5”x4” sheets of film, then back to the darkroom. One time I was in the darkroom processing sheets whilst my colleague was processing 120 roll films. I loaded all the sheets onto clips and stored them on two dowels sticking out of the wall then, being deep in conversation, put the light on! I can still see the grey sheets hanging there. We had to re-shoot.
Being young men we used to lark about, for instance the reducer we used for over-exposed negatives was based on caustic soda pellets (we didn’t use print tongs and your fingers used to get slimy as your fingerprints dissolved!). The instructions said add the pellets carefully to the water, we used to put them in the bottom of the mixing container then throw the water in to watch them bubble.
1 Retouching – we had a really good retoucher in Park Place. The retouched print, with a tissue overlay, was either pinned to the wall or laid on the floor, depending on size (we once took an internal window out to use the glass to flatten a plan) the re-photographed using a half-plate (6.5”x4.75”
mahogany Sanderson camera. This had been a lovely camera, but our premises were very damp and the brass was green and the wood had warped, we had to apply movements to correct the warp.
2 Tripod – the Linhof originally had chains from the legs the centre to hold the legs in place. The boss had taken the chains off so in strong winds one leg would slide and the tripod would crash over. I came back from lunch to find my boss sitting cross-legged on the wooden parquet block studio floor beating the Linhof camera baseboard with a ball hammer. He looked up and just said ‘tripod blew over’. When the screen was broken he did not want to pay £9 for a new one so he went to the local glass merchant and bought a peice of opaque toilet window glass, then drew a grid with a chinagraph pen on it. Focusing was really difficult after that, but it only cost 1/9 (£0.09).
3 Chemicals – we used to mix all our own chemicals up from powders. We had a mixing area with shelves covered in brown bottles, like a chemist, and we used a really old, hand-written ‘recipe book’.
All the above was in black-and white, colour was sent to a lab. I saw that colour was coming and took a Kodak colour printing course then got a job at a colour lab.
I hope that this helps and is not too long, let me know if I can help in any other way.
So glad i do motorsport, i hope that people will be more interested in talking about the vehicle rather than what their exploits. 
