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This picture goes back to the early 80s. Surprisingly how well it turned out, - quite crisp, and in pretty vivid colors. What I did on it in Photoshop was just a minor color/balance correction, and a little bit of retouch to remove a few apparent scratches.

For the long a color negative film with this, and a few other frames bearing images from the time in Aktybinsk Flight College sat in my archive, waiting for ‘the moment’.

Eventually, I thought it would be worth trying to apply a touch of modern technology to the old material in order to get something interesting out of this mix. Fact is, it’s been pretty simple, and worked fine. I just put the cuts with negatives into the scanner’s 35-mm film adapter, and, here we go. The result was impressive - totally satisfactory technically, and very ‘emotional’ personally, - evoking a further row of lifelike images within the mind. As if you’ve got another premium ride on the ‘Time Machine’

Recalling the occasion, I remember it was a quiet weekend day in the late summer/early autumn of 1981, when our first ‘flight semester’ at the Aqtyubinsk Flight College’s was nearing its end. We had stayed already for over a couple of months in the camp at the training base ‘Khlebodarovka.

So, two of us, me and my friend Sasha (’Shurik’) eased out from our dwelling place, which had long turned into a ‘barrack of boredom’, and set off for a leisure tour around the camp, with a mere purpose of ’shooting off’ a remainder of the film my ‘Zorki’ camera was still loaded with.

It looks like we had quite an enjoyable day for doing a bit of ‘outdoors’, - clear sky, and almost no wind. That’s what you could tell for sure from judging detail in this picture. It funny, here Shurik stands posing with a ‘meteorological observation station’ right behind him. Although a ‘wind sock’ on the mast looks like it deflected a bit from its vertical position, - which would mean, it caught  some blowing wind, I’m rather tending to think it was just designed his way: the sock itself was made of harder fabric, and a ‘loop fixture’ to hold the sock in the position was originally set up at some angle different from the ‘full nose down’.

Anyway, I’ll try to find out some information regarding ‘equipment’s standards’ they used when they build meteo-observation stations in those days. However, something tells me, I might be right.

As for temperature, it was ‘lukewarm’, somewhere in the low two-digit numbers. Don’t be disguised by a ‘fur coat’ Surik had on: he loved to stay ‘warm and comfy’, and, if asked, ‘why he always puts some extra cloths’, he would defiantly go, “I’m from Tashkent, see what I’m saying?”

(to be continued..)