A fascinating glimpse back to the 1950s with a film from a shooting party

This film is another from the small batch of 16mm films a bought from eBay a few weeks ago, and features a shooting party followed by some footage shot in a family garden.

Shooting Party film

This 16mm film was digitised on my new 16mm/9.5mm telecine constructed from an old Specto 500 dual format cine projector and then post-processed using Davince Resolve 19.1.

The film is quite well exposed and still retains good colour, but unfortunately the photographer seems to have had problems with the camera’s focus controls. There are portions of the film where the focus has wandered and this detracts from the film’s content. I don’t know if the photographer was new to the camera, or if it was a camera fault, but at least one of the other films that I digitised from the same batch had the same issue.

I don’t know the date of the film, but I suspect that it was post second world war, probably in the early to mid 1950s. Also the location is unknown, although I would be pretty confident that this was shot somewhere in the UK.

As to the subject matter of the film, I think this is some sort of shooting party or shooting event that the family attended. There certainly seem to be telescopic sights being handled, so I assume the shooters were firing at targets and then assessing how close to the centre each shot was.

The scenes in a family garden certainly feature some of the same people who attended the shooting event, but like the earlier scenes, some parts in the garden are obscured by the poor focus.