Three Square

So, in the end I did succumb to the temptation to buy a copy of the Topaz Gigapixel "uprezzing" software, which has inevitably caused me to delve back into the furthest reaches of my backfiles, not only for items to enlarge beyond their native size, but also to see what I might have overlooked or ignored from those earliest days of digicams; whether because the files were too small to bother with, or because my processing skills were not up to much 25 years ago, and I was unable to rescue many "good but technically challenging" photos.

I was still primarily using film back then, but from the late 1990s I had started to use a series of "digicams", starting with a 1 (one!) megapixel Fujifilm "FinePix" camera, eventually hitting my digital stride during 2002-5 with a 3 MP Olympus C3030z and then a 5 MP C5050z. That last was the camera that finally caused me to abandon film altogether. I had already given up working in an improvised darkroom at home – never my favourite thing, and inquisitive small children and trays of chemical solutions don't mix well – and the expense of paying a lab to process, proof, and print colour-negative film was no longer justifiable once I had acquired a suitable inkjet printer. I could make 20 x 15 cm (8" x 6") prints on A4 sheets at my own convenience: small, but better than any lab print and costing just a few pence to produce – essentially a tiny fraction of the price of inks and paper – and perfectly feasible to do at the same time as making an evening meal for those inquisitive small children.

I'm not going to review Gigapixel, other than to say that the resizing of files seems essentially seamless, especially if kept within modest bounds. Even just to be able to take a three megapixel image (cropped to a 13 cm square like those in my self-published book The Revenants) and double it to a 26 cm square is quite an exciting prospect: although to take it to the six-times max of 78 cm (2' 6") seems more than a little OTT to me. So here are a few of the finds among those overlooked pictures, all taken in 2003 with the 3 MP Olympus digicam. I've cropped them all square, in the spirit of The Revenants, and as was my usual practice at the time.

It's pretty clear that the novelty of the WYSIWYG screen on the digicam – postage-stamp sized though it was – took me in the direction of close-ups and pattern finding, a refreshing change after years of using various medium-format film cameras for my "serious" work. In the main the quality of these really very small image files is surprisingly good: those Olympus engineers certainly knew what they were doing. Their main shortcomings are a tendency to blow out highlights (though that may well have been my inexperience, too) and for any small specular highlights, like those on sparkling ice, to be rendered as tiny squares: inevitable, really, given the low pixel count of a three megapixel sensor. I've already enlarged and printed a few using Gigapixel, and I'm very pleased with them.