I have always been interested in photography.
At primary school, I would run around pretending to take photos and then dash away to draw a picture of the subjects for presenting to them later as a ‘photo’ ;o).
I also remember pegging negatives to photographic contact paper and leaving them in the sun all day to produce a pink, albeit transient image, without developing.
When I was in my early teens, my father bought me a secondhand Zenit single lens reflex camera which I used to photograph everything and anything, including, Newton's Rings, electrostatic phenomena and lightening during thunderstorms (using long exposures at night) away from any light pollution. I loaded 'bulk' black and white 35mm film into cassettes and developed my own images, as taught by my father.
As a physics student at Warwick, Leeds and Salford and later, as a medical research student, I used photographic techniques with radiography, radiation film badges, X-ray crystallography, electron beam diffraction studies, microscopy and corona discharge (Kirlian) photography. As postgraduate students in Oxford, my late wife, Rosie, and I enjoyed taking photos of the streets at night, using a £14 secondhand, tripod-mounted, Yashica twin lens reflex camera, with which I won a national photographic competition. I had not knowingly entered the competition, but that is another story. The prize was an SLR camera with auto-exposure, something not needed for night work, but it made other work much easier. The camera was not as nice as the Nikons and Leicas that I used at the Research Institute, but it was mine ;o)
When Rosie set up the Armadale Community and Heritage Website (
www.armadale.org.uk ) in 2006, my latent interest in photography surfaced again as we photographed our newly adopted town. Rosie had also had a keen interest in making and flying simple, small kites with pupils when she was a teacher in Stroud. So, having large kites in storage that Rosie had been given, and made, by her Aunt and Uncle (of the Golden Valley Kite Flyers), we decided that attaching a camera to the kite line may be of interest. The first camera was attached using two of the three legs of a mini-tripod and setting the 10 second shutter delay……and it worked! There was no turning back.
In 2007 we 'discovered’ our local 'castle' site of the Barony of Ogilface (
www.armadale.org.uk/archaeologyogilfaceindex.htm ), while we were out for a walk, and later asked the Edinburgh Archaeological Field Society if they would come out to investigate. It was during one of their follow-up geophysical surveys with Peter Morris, on the 5th August in 2008, that one Jim Knowles appeared and flew our kite. After some considerable time, we wondered if he would let us have it back ;o).
Rose and I continued photographing archaeological sites and, on the 28th January 2010, Jim brought his kite and rig to fly with us at a second Ogilface site. That was the beginning of the West Lothian Archaeology Group.
In April 2012, Rosie (knowing that her health was in decline), Jim and I signed the papers to set up the West Lothian Archaeological Trust (
www.wlatrust.org.uk ), witnessed by Sybil Cavanagh, at the West Lothian Local History Library in Linlithgow. The next day, Rosie had an operation which later proved to be unsuccessful. That autumn, terminally ill, Rosie asked for some of her money to be set aside for funding a pilot project to investigate and introduce cheap, simple, low-level aerial photography techniques to children and students. The first kite aerial photography (KAP) kit was donated to the Edinburgh University Archaeology Society in October 2012.
Rosie died on the 3rd March of 2013 (
www.armadale.org.uk/rosieobit.htm ) and her ashes were scattered over her beloved Cairnpapple (
www.armadale.org.uk/cairnpapple.htm ), partly by using one of her kites.
Following the preliminary donation of nine KAP kits, the Scottish National Aerial Photography Scheme (SNAPS) was officially launched on 1st May 2013:
www.SNAPScheme.infoAlso in May, The Trust became an Associated Partner of the EU's ArchaeoLandscapes Project:
www.archaeolandscapes.eu/My primary roles in SNAPS are to manage the
West Lothian Archaeology Website, to put together the kits and provide backup for users.
