The effect was much greater than we expected. Not only has WWW provided some of our best magazine features of the year, through contact with photographers around the world, but it gave us the impetus to change the name of our printed magazine (then called PHOTOpro) to PHOTON as well. We took a big drop in retail sales mid-year because of the confusion this caused - we are a very small company and don't have the budgets to re-launch a magazine - but things are beginning to pick up now as the new name gets established.
Sadly, the WWW edition is now threatened by its popularity. Out advertisers have helped us cover our costs and even put a little back towards the time and equipment involved in creating the WWW edition, but forthcoming hit-related charges in 1996 will quadruple our running expenses. We now have our own domain name - photonpub.co.uk - but as hardly anyone seems to be able to connect using this, its 'portability' to another server isn't going to help much.
So, if any big WWW service-provider with a proper marketing and sales division would like to strike a deal to host PHOTON, sell sponsorship and ad slots worldwide, and pay us a royalty on the content, we're ready to talk! It goes without saying that if the Website really did earn some income, we could do far more with it - especially in terms of time available for updating external links and the PHOTONet Index, which is now faced with hundreds of requests to review new photo sites.
It's been a funny year for Shirley and the family. Richard, our son, who has been working in the office for the last year or two, got married in May. He's now equipped with a PowerMac and WWW connection, and working on our advertising sites and Web construction for other people, at home. We got to be grandparents in September, but fortunately we still get plenty of callers who think Richard is my brother and not my son - and a few who make matters worse by thinking Shirley is my daughter, not my wife (work that one out!).
Shirley got her Masters Degree in Color Science after two years of mind-numbing number crunching. She used the Kodak ColorEase PS and the Fargo Primera printers to create comparative targets and ladders, instead of the traditional method of dyeing swatches of fabric, and to work on research into Standard Observer Values. She also used one of the first ten Colortron digital spectrophotometers, alongside Minolta, Hunter, ICS and other lab equipment. In the end, she found that the Colortron was just as accurate as any of the other instruments, but none of them agreed with the others, and none of them agreed with her human observers - who were more consistent among themselves than the machines were. So, with over 500 packed pages of thesis to show for it, she had demonstrated that the results you get in color management depend mainly on the type of equipment you use to take measurements, and that the human eye is likely to be more consistent and accurate in agreeing on color matching anyway.
Then she found that once you have your Masters Degree there isn't much you can do with it. For the information of anyone interested, the color targets and ladders created in the desktop printers were more accurate and precise than any of the previous manually-dyed samples used by previous researchers.
To celebrate losing half a family and getting a higher degree, Shirley decided we could have a dog. We found a Samoyed puppy on the other side of Scotland, and she settled in well. But something went wrong - we remain convinced that vaccination shots may lie at the root of this - and she lost her sight at three months old. Damage to the optic nerve or center in the brain seems to have caused it. She has adapted very well, but a blind dog can never be properly free or independent. One thing has happened, though; we moved to this small town in Scotland seven years ago, and it's in nature of places like this that incomers take a long time to get known. Because of Belle, our very beautiful but blind Samoyed puppy, everyone knows us now - and they all know her. Vets, friends and experience dog-owners have said we might be better having her put down if there's no chance of her sight recovering, but we could never do that. We would never be forgiven! Belle makes people happy, because she is confident, and happy, and patient, and friendly - despite her disability.
But they don't get to see the holes in the office carpet (great stuff for chewing) or the trail of demolished Nike trainers...
As Christmas approached, my father's 83rd birthday passed, and something changed. In May he had insisted on driving my brothers the 200 miles to Richard's wedding in Scotland; by November we had to make that journey the other way, to see him between spells in hospital. Richard and Sharon took his new great-grandson Edward down to see him a little later, which cheered him up a good deal. On December 18th, told by his consultant that he could leave the hospital but would just have to accept his condition, he called for a taxi and went home. When the morning came my mother found that he had died, peacefully, in his sleep.
Though this is not the place to say any more about him, as few who read this will have known him or even be of his generation, Thomas Sheldon Kilpatrick was, at the height of his career, second in command of the entire nationalized British Steel industry as Director of Operations of BSC. He was a World War II bomber pilot, surviving to be a prisoner of war after his Halifax was shot down over Germany; as the son of a Glasgow shipyard worker, he had won his way to an Oxford scholarship, where he first learned to fly. In retirement he served as a Government advisor and on the board or as chairman of private companies, and was awarded the CBE, the honour one step below a Knighthood.
While he saw his eldest son enter the steel industry and make a conventional career in life, he also saw the kind of industry he helped build in Britain in the 1950s and 60s disappear with equal speed in the 70s and 80s. The education he thought would ensure real, solid prosperity for his sons proved to be of little value; my middle brother ended up earning far more running a small fleet of delivery trucks than he would have in the automobile manufacturing industry he first entered, and for myself, I haven't had a job for over twenty years.
Despite this, I owe my whole career to him. When I was 14, he gave me his old Zeiss camera, and let me use his Pentax and his Standard 8 cine camera; when I was 16, he helped me buy a Pentax of my own, and (with just about zero help from me, I regret to say) cleared out the coal-cellar of our house to make a darkroom for me. This was no ordinary sacrifice, because the coal-cellar was a 10 x 12ft room with an external coal chute, and an internal door to the house so that no-one needed to go outside for fuel. From then on the coal had to be fetched from outside. He built the benches, found equipment for me, and never complained when I spent all my time in there. When the great British public school he had paid a considerable amount to send me to suggested I was academically held back by my unhealthy interest in this hobby (which they had banned me from continuing), he removed me from the school. When I wanted to join a newspaper instead of taking up a university place, he agreed - but suggested I should become a reporter, as journalists were more likely to get on the management track than photographers, and I could already take photographs anyway. He was right, but I'm glad he was not better informed, or he would have suggested I became an ad rep or circulation assistant!
Richard drove Shirley and me down to his funeral on December 28th. The weather was dreadful; Scotland had been experiencing temperatures down to minus 22 degress Centigrade, the roads were covered in ice, and the country in snow. Taking the long but safe motorway route, we were half an hour from our destination when we hit stationary traffic. All I could do was telephone to say that we were not going to be there in time. It turned out that a truck had caught fire, and the fire crews were unable to extinguish it as the water froze on leaving the hoses. We arrived just as the cortege was leaving the church.
On our return to Scotland that night, we found the pipes frozen, because no-one had run any water during the day. We acted quickly to trace the freeze (this place has three boilers and at least a thousand feet of copper pipe, with four outside stopcocks), backed up hot water into the cold supply pipes, and put heaters near bare plumbing. The next day it thawed. We had no bursts and our water was back on line within hours. The rest of Kelso had a different story; hundreds of houses have been flooded, many while their owners were away for Christmas. Newly-built houses have suffered alongside older ones. Our neighbour is a plumber and found his holiday season ended quickly; each time he left to do a job, twenty more messages would be waiting on his return. Throughout Scotland homes have been ruined by the severe freeze, and there is some threat of these conditions (colder than Moscow) returning. In the Shetland Islands, people went without electricity or water for days.
There is another side to this, though never worth the general cost paid for the private experience: when taking Belle for her 2.0am circuit beside the River Tweed on Christmas night, I stood and watched great mounds of snow-covered ice moving silently along in the moonlight. They were forming in the dark, still pool below the heights of Maxwellheugh, where the Abbey bells sleep in secret depths. Each ice-galleon broke away without a sound, drifting slowly until it reached the shallows of Crown Point where the river crosses the old drained marshes, then speeding up to sail past us on the rushing water.
At times like this I am glad I became a photographer, even though no camera could ever capture what I have seen; the eye, mind and memory must replace lens and film, and it is only through words that we can share such images.
� David Kilpatrick