This photo was taken in November 1987. We were travelling around India and Nepal before heading of to Australia to start a new life. If memory serves me correctly we had been staying on a house boat on Dal Lake in Srinagar and we were just leaving to head off to Kathmandu in Nepal. I was quite ill at this stage having gone down with amoebic dysentery and Helen wasn’t well either. We had a long journey ahead of us across the top of India from Srinagar to Jammu by bus and then Jammu to Gorakhpur by train and then finally catch a bus to the Nepali border where we would stay the night. The journey to Jammu Railway Station had left us absolutely wiped out and we were left with some time to kill before our train. While on the platform we met the lady in the photo above. She lived on the platform under a bit of a tarp and she saw herself as a missionary to the people travelling on the railway.  We got talking, she was very excited to chat with us – I don’t think many westerns were coming through at the time because  there was an ongoing armed insurgency with rebels demanding independence and several tourists had been killed. We’d been in India long enough to know that if you were a westerner you’d be approached for money. What this homeless lady did was offer to help us. She just had the clothes she stood in, a few religious pamphlets and her bedding. Finding out that we had “bad” stomachs she gave us cardamon pods to chew as it is considered to be an aid to digestion in India.  The encounter did not last long, but, it has a long lasting effect on us both. We both think about her regularly and often wonder what happened to her.

 

This is another exercise in camera scanning – this time with colour transparency film. The original image was taken by Helen on her Olympus OM40 with the Olympus OM Zuiko 35-105mm f3.5-4.5 lens. The film stock was Kodak Ektachrome 100. Unfortunately over the last 37 years time has not been kind to the transparency and it has taken on a magenta colour shift and become very muddy. The scan cleaned up nicely in Lightroom with a couple of finishing touches done in Photoshop. This was all done manually. Trying to psych myself up for colour negatives next.