Jon Crispin's Notebook

This is a bit of an experiment.  When I was out at Willard recently, I shot the bowling alley in Hadley Hall and then went upstairs to the projection room.  The lighting was the weirdest I have come across.  I shoot most of this stuff in RAW, so that I have tons of latitude when it comes to editing the photos.  I messed around with these images for a long time and I could NOT get the color to look good.  The walls were yellowish and there were mixed fluorescents.  Rather than get discouraged and stuff the whole idea of a post I decided to convert to black and white and see how they look online.  Funny, since in the days of film I used to shoot this sort of thing in black and white much of the time.

The tradition for the projectionists was to write the name of the film and the date it was shown on the walls.

Lots of interesting films here.  For example, “All Fall Down” was shown on 13 January, 1963, and Apache Rifles got a (Good) rating.

And here “The Glass Slipper” was shown on 14 April, 1956.  And these were all 35mm prints!

What really interests me about the asylum having shown first run movies is that the residents of the institution were able to attend, as were the people who lived in the surrounding towns.  From what I have been told, the townsfolk sat in the balcony and the asylum residents sat downstairs.

I like these notes for the projectionist.  There must have been someone downstairs who could send some sort of signal in case of a problem.

The projection room seemed to me to be almost totally intact.  The sheet of paper here might be hard to read online, but at the top of the list is “Back To The Future”.

Here’s another of the projection lenses.  A beautifully made optic.

There was still quite a bit of paperwork lying around.

I was just blown away by this room and its contents.

It is really hard to put into words just how fortunate I am to get into places like this, and how important it is to me to be able to preserve images of something that very few people can see for themselves.

So, thank you all for checking in and encouraging me to do this kind of work.  I am off to Rotterdam tomorrow to shoot more suitcases and will post an update to that project very soon.