Craft! Bang! Boom!

I hadn’t intended on doing any developing this weekend, but as we started trying out some of the new cameras, it seemed like the thing to do. I decided to give Diafine another chance, primarily because it was hot and I was lazy. It was already mixed up, and since you use water in place of a stop bath, there was one less chemical I had to deal with. Also, Diafine works well at warmer temps than other black and white chems, which was nice since I was developing out in the garage this time.

I had plenty of issues with Diafine last time, but this time went a little better, I think mainly because it was at a warmer temp. I’m still not crazy about it for sheet film. I have no idea why, but I just seem to get weird little dots and marks on the sheet film that don’t seem to show up on roll film. It probably has something to do with agitation.

So, here’s what Diafine is good for:

1. Developing found film. It absolutely rocks for this. It eats 60 year old Verichrome Pan like it’s a tasty dooughnut.

Mmmm, doughnuts…

2. Cross processing color negative film into black and white. The picture above was shot with Fuji NPS160, a color negative film. Dropped it into the Diafine, and it came out perfectly processed without having to stress out over developing time.

3. Developing film when the ambient temp is too warm for other black and white chems.

4. Developing film when you just have one or two rolls of film to work with, instead of an epic amount (which is how I normally develop).

So, what was I developing (besides the above roll of film, which was shot with the Savoy and left over from the New York trip)? Well, we started to get out some of our auction cameras and experiment with them. Or, I should say, Travis fell in love with a few cameras, so we started using those.

One of the first lots we won at the auction was a box filled with a bunch of miscellaneous cameras, the Agfa Readyset being one of them.

It was the only camera I wound up getting that was loaded with a roll of film. It also came with a box, carrying case, and exposure guide. It’s in perfect condition, and Travis immediately bonded with it, so I guess it’s his now. He finished off the roll that was in the camera, and then immediately picked out a roll of Gevaert 620 that expired in 1947 to load into the camera.

And then he shot that roll up in about 40 minutes. It’s camera love, I tell you! I don’t even think I’ve touched the Readyset yet! Granted, the decades old roll of film was barely able to capture an image, but no matter. It’s now loaded up with some respooled Ektachrome that’s less than 10 years old. Fresh!

So, that’s Travis’ new camera. Here’s the one I’ve bonded with so far:

It’s the mighty Revueflex E! Yeah, I’ve never heard of it before either. Apparently, it’s a rebranded version of the Zenit E, another camera I’ve never heard of before. All I know is that it’s big and clunky, the aperture ring seems to be the opposite of reality, it’s enitrely non-intuitive to use, and the lens sometimes looks like it’s getting ready to just give up and fall off the front of the camera. I kind of love it. I threw a generic roll of color negative film into it and am halfway through shooting the roll.

So Travis has the Readyset, and I’m having fun with the Revueflex, but we both can agree when it comes to one thing – the awesomeness of the RB Graflex Tele.

There is so much weird about this camera, I don’t even know where to begin. When it’s all closed up, it looks like a simple box with some metal mechanisms on one side of it. There is no obvious way to open up the front of the camera. We finally figured out that if you turn the knob at the bottom, the little door on the front of the camera pops open and the lens and bellows begin to extend.

Okay. But then how do you focus?

Oh! You pull up on the handle on top of the camera, and a viewing hood extends up! And that’s when it hit us – this was not like our other Graphics. This was a true Graflex, a single lens reflex. That means there’s a mirror inside of the camera that allows you to focus, but then also flips up and out of the way when the shutter is pushed.

Oh yes, the shutter. Now how do we fire that?

Um… what in the who now?

It turns out that the metal mechanisms on the side control two things – which aperture setting the curtain shutter is set to, and the amount of tension that is used to pull the curtain down. So, if I wanted a shutter speed of 1/100, I’d round up to 1/110, and then set the curtain aperture at 3/8 of an inch (that’s the actual size of the hole in the curtain) and set the tension to 1.

That may sound really confusing, but after the first few tries, it started to make sense.

There’s actually some really cool features that the RB (or ‘Tank,’ as Travis named it, since it’s army green and black) has that Zarl and Zarl Jr don’t have. The viewing hood is really nice. It’s easy to focus, you don’t have to worry about glare, and you don’t have to worry about composing a shot and then having the camera move when you shove the film pack in, since you can load your film holder into the camera first, and then focus. Also, the “RB” in the name stands for ‘rotating back.’ That means the back of the camera will actually turn, so if you want to shoot a vertical photo, you don’t have to turn the entire camera or the tripod.

The RB takes 3 1/4″ x 4 1/4″ and special Graflex sheet film holders – apparently the regular ones don’t work in this particular camera. All we got at the auction was this particular camera, no extras. So you’d think that since we would need such specialty items, it would be a little while before we could try out this camera.

Well, not so! Turns out last summer, I bought a big lot of 4×5 film holders on ebay that also wound up coming with 3 3×4 film holders… specifically, the kind that you need to use with this camera. I never really thought much about them before, or noticed that they looked slightly different than the other film holders, but serendipitously, they turned out to be just what we needed.

Also, I wound up buying a pack of film (also on ebay) a few months back – I assume with the thought of using it in a pinhole camera – of Kodak Orthographic film. I know I bought it because it was originally supposed to be used with an electron microscope, and, well, electron microscopes are cool. But when it came, it turned out to be a lot smaller than I had anticipated, so I never opened it.

So, score on both counts, because the film fit into the film holders, albeit a little loosely. And since it’s orthographic film, it’s a lot slower than normal film – its film speed is rated at 12 (as opposed to 100 or 200, etc). We had to use slower shutter speeds and wide open apertures.

But keeping in mind the slightly bewildering developing affects from the Diafine, the actual image quality is pretty damn good.

Here’s a detail from the above photo at 100%:

Neat, huh?

We went to the camera show on Saturday, and I got a bunch of film, a new lens and lensboard for Zarl (it was cheap-ish, and the $5 lens made me nervous enough on vacation to want a reliable back-up), and a few boxes of old photo paper and glass plates (I know, I know… one more thing for me to try out). Most of the stuff for sale there, though, was more geared toward “The Camera Collector” – people who spend thousands of dollars on gear and shoot with Leicas and stuff like that. Which is fine, but not really what I’m into. I mean, there was almost no film for sale here – I guess because everyone shoots with in-date stuff and doesn’t deal with the expired film? Heresy!

Even with the film I did wind up getting, and the $3 box of glass plates, I still think Travis managed to find the score of the weekend – a pair of Kodak rocks glasses, which we used to drink copious amounts of alcohol while performing the Great Memorial Day Weekend Film Inventory:

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(While I was in the middle of cleaning cameras last night, Ellie decided to play boat. It was not helpful.)

So, we did the auction thing yesterday. Wound up coming home with 22 cameras, probably the majority of which will eventually wind up in the shop. I cleaned a bunch of them last night, and need to figure out which ones I need to test. I got some goofy 35mm cameras, 120s, 620, 127s, 616s… About a third of them were things I’ve never seen before, which is a lot of fun. I’ve got a bit of research to do tracking down model names and manuals and such.

As far as actually bidding on stuff went, for the most part I’m happy with what I wound up getting and the prices I paid for them. There was only one time when I just freaked out and kept bidding on something, and immediately after I won, I was all, “Oh god, why did I just do that?!” Of course, it happened with the most expensive camera I wound up getting, a 4×5 (wait for it…) Speed Graphic. I got it for $95. I still have no idea why. I certainly don’t need another one, especially one that has, like this one, a bellows in serious disrepair. I think I got sucked in because it came with a case, and some extra film holders, and is painted ninja black. It does have a working lens, which is a relief, because I can maybe swap that out for my other cameras.

But still, even if I didn’t need it, the Ninja Graflex is pretty cool, crappy bellows and all, and even if I overpaid on that, I’m fairly confident I got a bargain on the rest of the stuff I purchased. Travis and I literally walked out of the auction with one dollar left between us. It was kind of hilarious.

The bummer is that there was so much stuff to be auctioned that we had to leave before it was all over – there were a bunch of miscellaneous ‘Box of Crap’s that I so love that we couldn’t stick around for. We were there two hours after the scheduled ending time of the auction, and there was probably at least another hour’s worth of stuff to get through.

Today is the actual camera show, with vendors, so we’re going back down to see what we else we can pick up. I’m hoping to pick up mainly expired film and paper there, maybe some darkroom materials, stuff like that. Hopefully I can find some really bizarre stuff.

Oh, hey, here’s probably my best accidental buy of the day:

There was a box of film that I had been eyeing up since the beginning of the auction, but everything else in the world seemed to go first. Finally, right before we had to leave, Travis asked one of the guys running the thing if the film was going to be up for bid anytime soon, and that guy immediately brought it to the auctioneer. I wound up scoring this box of film for $5, which is insanely low, even if most everything in it expired in the last 80s/early 90s.

I hadn’t examined the box at all besides it registering on my brain ‘Hey! Big box o’ film! Want!’ Most of the stuff inside is 35mm, not my favorite format, but on the ride home I started poking through it and found…

This was like finding the holy grail. Kodak stopped making color infrared film a few years ago. There’s one guy who bought up the remaining stock and is selling them on ebay, one roll at a time for over $20 a roll, plus shipping from Europe. I’ve always wanted to try shooting one, but could never justify the cost. And here, with a package of a bunch of other fun and awesome film, is a roll. For $5!!! Insane. Here’s a link to the color infrared group on Flickr, so you can see some examples of what color infrared looks like.

Fortunately, the roll is 36 exposures, so I may divide up the roll in half or 3 pieces to shoot, so if I screw it up, I won’t waste the whole roll. And I also have to figure out how to develop it, since it’s E4. But still – yay!

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I kind of love this picture. This comes from a lot of slides I picked up outside of Savannah, Georgia, at some semi-scary flea market. It was the dogs that got to me. It was a weekly event, and there were a lot of people selling puppies – a whole aisle of people with puppies in cages and it freaked us out. My instincts were screaming ‘Puppy mills! Puppy mills! SNOOPY COME HOME!!’ Of course, everyone there may have been responsible breeders, but the whole vibe was just kind of creepy.

So we walked really fast by the puppy part so as not to get sucked in. One thing we didn’t need to pick up in Georgia was a puppy to accompany us on our 10 hour drive back north. But then we found a stash of slides in the antique area of the flea market, and those were just about as big as a puppy (but less wiggly!) so we took those home instead.

Incidentally, I finally started putting some found slides up in my Etsy shop. I’m selling them in little bundles of 3 dozen slides each, which is more than enough to make a small lamp. I’ve got a ton more that I need to sort through, so there should be plenty of them being posted in the upcoming few weeks.

A few brief housekeeping things – the web address http://www.craftbangboom.com/ is being off and on wonky right now. Travis is working on getting it fixed, but the alternate address, http://yarnzombie.net/craft/ , is functioning smoothly, so you may need to use that one. If you come across any blog weirdness, just let me know. We’re trying to get things sorted.

Also, I’m going to an auction today! A CAMERA auction! Holy crap! I figure that everything will either be too expensive for us to get and it will just be fun to watch, or we’ll go crazy and bid on everything, leaving us broken husks of people weeping silently together in the parking lot, surrounded by boxes of expired photo paper and instamatic cameras, as the sun sets, disapprovingly, behind us. Should be fun!

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I looked at the forecast for the next week, and it’s all the same – mostly sunny, highs in the mid-80s. Sounds like perfect lumen weather to me! The first few times I tried doing lumen prints, it was probably 20-15 degrees cooler and more cloudy. I was looking forward to seeing the difference between the results then and now.

I did a few things differently. Instead of taking my photo paper outside, laying it on the deck, positioning stuff on top of it and then setting the glass on it, I plugged in the red safelight in the bathroom and did all of my layering in there. I also set the paper on something hard (books or cardboard) before taking it outside. That way, I could easily position the prints to where they’d get the best sun, moving them around if shadows started to fall on them.

I also taped around the edges of my pieces of glass so I wouldn’t cut myself like a doofus (again). Safety first! Or eventually!

I did two sets of prints yesterday, each about 4 hours or so. From the morning batch came the above print on Agfa Brovira paper, which turned out kind of meh, except for the one detail, which I liked. Using some Kodak Polycontrast Rapid II RC paper, I got the following:

Hey! Look at that! Finally starting to get some color! Here’s a detail from the same print:

Neat.

Unfortunately, most of the photo paper I have doesn’t have any dates listed on them, so I just have to guess on their age. I think the above prints both came from papers that dated from the 1970s-1980s, judging by their packaging.

I went a little more old and new school for the afternoon batch. Using some newish Ilford Multigrade III RC Deluxe Glossy paper, I did this print with variegated Hosta leaves and pink peony petals:

At least with this paper, the colors of the actual objects used don’t seem to affect the end result at all. The petals, like I said, were hot pink, and the hosta leaves had a thick white outline on the edge of the leaves. However, I’m not sure if color would have a different effect on paper with a different chemistry, or maybe even with just a matte finish instead of glossy.

This print was using circa 1970s Kodak Kodabromide II RC F 4 paper, and barely came out at all.

So I just photoshopped it into submission.

Ha! Take that, Kodabromide!

But the absolute best result I’ve had so far was with some Kodak Velox Single Weight F 3 paper. Travis found it for me at an antique store a few weeks ago. I had completely overlooked the package since it wasn’t in a Kodak yellow package. Because the Kodak branding looked so weird, I’d date this paper to at least 1940, if not earlier.

It’s colorcastic! And that’s how it wound up looking even after I fixed it. I was kind of scared, and only wound up keeping it in the fixer for 30 seconds or so, but the fixers was warmer than room temp, too, so heck if I know how long the image will keep. Also, the edges of the paper are shiny metallic, which is pretty neat.

Today I’m doing some more prints. They went out at around 10:00 am, and I’ll probably pull them around 4:00 pm. I’m using some different papers today (although I’m doing more with the Velox), including finally trying a sheet of the color photo paper. Right now that one looks blue and orange. I’m also using Efke’s direct positive paper, and have a glass negative on top of that. That could either turn out being awesome or… not so much. Oh, and I tried using orange slices in addition to the leaves and other foliage. I’m curious to see if the acid of the orange will cause the paper to react strangely.

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I’ve moved on from the Great Developing Despair of 2010. Went back into the darkroom today for the third time. The first day I did darkroom stuff was all chaos and bad results, but the second day went a little better. I’ve been having problems with contrast, but finally managed to get a decently contrasty print.

A lot of the issues I’ve been having are due to two things – first, I have very limited experience with photo paper, and therefore not much of a grasp yet on how best to use it, and secondly, I have, as always, accumulated a sizable amount of expired photo paper to play with. I’ve read that some expired paper is good for using to make the lumen prints or lith prints, but I wanted to try using it in a regular darkroom capacity, too. However, I don’t quite understand photo paper yet, which brings me back to my first point.

As a result, I’ve decided to put off experimenting with the expired paper for the most part, and instead have been working my way through a box of 100 sheets of 5×7 Arista II Graded RC Fine Lustre #3 paper. Of course, I just now looked up that paper on Freestyle’s website, and they only have two listings for it, so, wtf Freestyle? I guess maybe they phased it out in place of something else? I don’t know. I bought it a few years ago, and for some reason, even though I order a bunch of stuff from them, I haven’t gotten a new Freestyle catalog in about a year. I guess maybe they stopped sending them out to save the environment or something. I went ahead and requested that they send me one anyway – I can’t really get into poring through a pdf catalog like I can with a digital one.

O hai, have I digressed? Anyway, back to the paper. The Arista II paper is working pretty great for me, although I’m still shaky on achieving the contrast that I’m after. So, today I went back in the darkroom to try again.

35mm negative blown up to a 5×7:

I thought this turned out really well. I think next time I attempt lith prints, I’ll try this negative.

After messing around with some black and white negatives, I decided to try making a print of color film that I had cross processed in black and white chems. I picked the negative that seemed to have the most contrast in it, and gave it a shot.

Boy, did that turn out like ass! As I had suspected, the orange color of the color negative wound up producing an ultra low contrast print.

But that got me to thinking… cross processed slide film didn’t produce the orange tint in the negative like color negative film did. The film base normally has a specific tint which varies based what type of film you’re using – remember this?

- but that tint wasn’t the same shade of orange that you find in C-41 film.

The first film I tried was some X-pro’d Fuji Velvia 50. It’s the film on the top left above, with the reddish-purpley tint.

Not too bad. Still a little low contrasty, but a heck of a lot better than the Newark Drugs photo.

Next up was some cross processed Kodak Ektachrome 400. I got pretty bored with this film, since I’d get a consistent green cast to the pictures. However, it actually turned out to produce a pretty decent black and white print.

(Toby!)

Also in the Kodak family, here’s a print of some cross processed Kodak E100G.

For comparison, here’s the original scan:

Then I switched it up a bit by making a print of cross processed Fuji 64T film. This is the film that had negatives turn out amazingly bright grassy green. Here’s the original photo scan:

And here’s the black and white print:

The Kodak and the Fuji 64T negatives almost got a little too contrasty, which is fine with me. All in all, it was pretty neat to see how well the X-pro’d negs worked with the black and white paper. It even worked when I made an enlargement onto some ortho-lith film to produce a black and white slide.

By the way, I am now loving the ortho lith film. Basically, it’s film that acts like a paper – it’s safe to use under a red safelight, and you can make enlargements onto it to produce a big positive slide. I bought some 5×7 ortho lith film with the intent to make a 5×7 pinhole camera and use that film in it, but now I think I may just produce some gigantic slides….

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One of the cameras I picked up a few weeks back in Amish country is a Valiant ’620′ (yes, there are inexplicable quotation marks around the 620 on the camera). I haven’t photographed it yet, but it’s a silly little camera that looks like it’s wearing ear muffs. It’ll be up in the Etsy shop soon, hopefully.

Anyway, it was loaded with a roll of old Kodak Verichrome Pan, which is always a joy to find, since it reliably develops well. It went in the Diafine 5+5 bath and most of the roll came out reasonably well, with only a minimum of fog. The last few pictures on the roll were more fogged that the rest, which is common with film of this age (especially since the entire roll wasn’t wound all the way onto one spool). Unfortunately for me, one of the last pictures on the roll was the most intriguing.

The majority of the pictures were of some little girls, with a few dog shots thrown in for good measure. But the above photo – which I cropped to remove as much fog as possible, and adjusted the levels to try to get contrast, was the one that caught my eye.

Can you read the girl’s sweatshirt? You may need to click on the picture and go to the bigger version. But I’m pretty sure it has a caricature of the Beatles on it, with the word “Shurrup” underneath it. What? A quick google search of “beatles” and “shurrup” led to this page from a book by Philip Norman called “Shout!: the Beatles in their Generation.” Apparently, the Beatles had, on at least one occasion, cause to yell “Shurrup!” at a bunch of reporters. Not quite sure why that was sweatshirt-worthy, but hey, it was the crazy, swinging 60s, and anything went!

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I had a shit developing day yesterday. Totally shit. Shite, even. I’ve been in the middle of writing a post about my two days I spent in my brand new darkroom – the first day went so-so, the second day went better – but then yesterday I had the Shit Developing Day, so screw it. I’ll talk about darkroomy stuff later.

I tend to be pretty chipper about the photography stuff, even when I have a series of spectacular FAILs, because I’m a geek and figure even from the worst experience I can learn something from it. Even when Zarl‘s shutter went weird on me on vacation, I never really got that freaked out – I was irritated, but kind of went into problem solving mode (at least, that’s how I remember it – Travis was there, so he may have a different take on it).

Anyway, yesterday, I was trying to develop some sheet film from vacation – 4×5 and 2×3 film from the Graflexes – and also some old funky black and white roll film. I was also using film developers that weren’t my beloved Kodak HC110b, partly to get rid of some weird stuff I had laying around, partly to develop some film that’s not recommended to be developed in HC110, and partly to finally try out the pack of Diafine I bought a while ago but hadn’t gotten into yet.

Being brief (for once), I got really horrid results developing about 90% of the sheet film – partly because I think I had camera issues (it looks like most of the shots with Zarl were underexposed), partly because I think I had film holder issues (I suspect some of my film holders for the Century Graphic are light leaky), partly because I was, as always, using my developer at the wrong temps, partly because I think some of my developer was just plain old and needed to be put out of its misery, and partly because Diafine is apparently uber finicky about how the developing tank is agitated during developing. There was maybe some other bad stuff, too. It’s all a blur. Oh, at one point I dumped developer all over my counter. When that doesn’t even approach the bottom 5 low points for the day, then that’s trouble.

So, I was kind of bummed about the results I was getting, so much so that I quit developing before getting all of my film done (I still have some of the 2×3 film and a few rolls left to go). And that was probably for the best, since it was going downhill quickly.

Now I’m trying to think about how to salvage the other film – all of the 4×5 slide film I took with Zarl, specifically. I guess what I’m going to try to do is develop one sheet of it in the E6 chems and see if that’s wildly underexposed too. If so, maybe I can push the film? Maybe that can compensate for the underexposure? Heck if I know!

I do know, though, that I think my next big project is to go through and test all of my film holders. That means taking pictures with each film holder, and developing them one at a time to see if there are light leaks. Sounds tedious! But informative!

And along the way of doing that, I’ll also see if I can hone in on the correct aperture adjustment/shutter speeds for Zarl. That 5×7 lens is a tricky, tricky beast. Evil, deceptive lens!

So, I’ve got my work set out for me. I’m actually kind of looking forward to it, except for the fact that I think I should probably buy some in-date 4×5 film to use. All – and I mean all (I have a pretty sizable 4×5 film stash) – of the 4×5 sheet film I have is expired. Every last freaking piece. I’m thinking to test out shutter speeds and stuff like that, I probably should use something that is still fresh and shiny. This wounds me in two ways. First, it means that I’ll actually have to suck it up and buy in date film from somewhere, probably at full price (sob!). Second, it means that my testing of the two boxes of military issue Isopan and X-F Pan 4×5 sheet film that expired in the early 1950s is probably going to be put on hold. Yes, I recently bought 4 boxes of 4×5 sheet film that expired 6 decades ago. Yes, I am nuts. But yes, just owning such film makes me feel like a spy.

But back to the title. I had problems with Diafine. The sheet film I developed with it looks like ass, although I’m more than willing to believe that a lot of that is on me and my crappy developing. But! I did have one bright shiny bit of happiness yesterday, in between my stunned looks at the increasingly horrid results I was getting with the sheet film. And that bit of happiness was the results I got with the old, expired roll film.

I love my HC110b, I admit it, and it’s been my go-to developer for film of mysterious origin. However, when doing a bit of research on Diafine, I was reading back through some of the old discussions on the Flickr Diafine group. I ran across a post from Moominsean (I swear, I don’t stalk him!) where he said he’s been using Diafine as his go-to developer for expired film, 5 minutes in Solution A, 5 minutes in Solution B. So, I gave it a shot, and it turned out great. Verichrome Pan turned out almost as good as new, in-date film, and I got my best results yet from Ansco All-Weather Pan.

So, in my big developing shit-pile, at least I got something good out of it. I’ll probably try the Diafine again for sheet film when I start doing my Epic! Film! Holders! Test!, just because the developer is already mixed up and ready to go. Maybe I just need to get it a few degrees warmer. I don’t know. But at least I know it works great with the old, funky films. Maybe it’ll dig that expired Cold-War era military film I have!

Incidentally, now that I’ve gotten some film developed from these cameras, I should be putting up a new batch of funky cameras up in the Etsy shop in the next week. I may have missed my window of opportunity to take decent product shots judging by the forecast (rain), but I’ll try to get them up soon.

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I’ve got almost everything ready for my darkroom set up. The last thing I need to figure out is where my red safelight should live, but frankly, I’m still in the ‘getting over having been miserably sick’ phase of being sick, so I haven’t spent too much time thinking about darkroom issues.

Although I didn’t have the energy to set up the darkroom or develop film, I could, with an extreme minimum of effort, try out something that’s been on my list of ‘Things I want to try’ for a few weeks. Lumen prints!

You can read the little article I linked to above for more information (it’s short, but inspiring), but here’s the explanation in a nutshell: Take a piece of photographic paper outside, put some plants (or other things, but plants work really well) on top of it, and then stick a piece of glass over the plants and paper (or not), let it sit for a half hour or longer, and then fix (or don’t).

Everything I read seemed a tiny bit confusing and vague. So I’ve tried this a few times over the past few days to see what happens.

Apparently, you can get really wonderful colors from the lumen prints even though you’re using black and white photo paper (Note – I haven’t seen any examples of lumen prints done on color photo paper, so I don’t know if it’ll work or not yet. I do happen to have some color photo paper, so I’m definitely going to try it, though!). However, it seems that fixing the print will tend to bleach out those colors to some extent. However (again!), if you don’t fix your print, then it will eventually go weird and turn black (I’m assuming) in the light. So, apparently a lot of people make their lumen prints and then scan them in before fixing (or just scan them in and don’t fix, I guess).

I kind of meant to do that, but then just got too caught up in Lumen! Madness! and didn’t. Whoops! So, instead, I just fixed my prints for a few minutes using a diluted form of my eco-friendly fixer. It seemed to work, but it also seemed to turn my prints the same brownish shade.

Also realized, after having done a few of these, that the thinner you can make your layer of stuff (plants, whatever), the better. The above print was done using a branch from our curly willow tree. A tree branch is a lot thicker than a leaf. Here’s a detail shot from the same print:

Brown-ness aside, that’s pretty flippin’ cool!

Also, more is not necessarily better. The print of the hops vine at top is kind of interesting, but it would have been better had I not had a stack of leaves folded up in the center. Here’s a print of some Columbine flowers that’s not quite as messy:

But, still brown. Mostly. Here’s a detail of one of the flowers:

A little bit of color there. So, potential!

I’m not quite sure what conditions need to improve in order to get the fun colors. I suspect it’s a combination of a lot of things, like age and type of paper used (the older and funkier the paper, the better, apparently), humidity, temperature, and exposure to light, things like that. I’ve only been able to do about 2-3 hour exposures so far in overcast conditions. I’ve got some outside right now that will at least get about 8 or 9 hours of light in partly cloudy weather, although I may try leaving them out all weekend. I have a lot of idea for things I want to try using this technique. The best part about it, though, is that it’s so easy, and all you really need is a bit of photo paper and fixer (or a scanner). Right now, brainless, low-energy activities are about my speed.

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My first real interest in photography expressed itself in when I was a sophomore in high school. I was taking Journalism with the thought that after I passed the class, I would join the high school newspaper with the intention of being a photographer. All I really wanted to was take and develop some pictures – that just sounded like buckets of fun.

But no. I signed up for the paper all right, but the weaselly journalism adviser placed me as news editor instead of a photographer. Well, that’s just peachy, isn’t it? So I spent a year being a bitter news editor, and then my senior year got promoted to bitter co-editor-in-chief with a friend who wanted the job about as much as I did. After a semester, we had had enough of the crap, and quit along with another page editor. It was our senior year, none of us had wound up with the job we wanted on the newspaper, and all of the fun had been sucked out of it. I spent the last semester of high school being a teacher’s aide for the football coach, of all people – we had absolutely nothing in common, and he always seemed bemused by my presence, but it was a lot less stressful than being yelled at because no one on the newspaper staff knew how to spell “Merrillville” correctly (even now, I had to go look it up).

It’s too bad, when I look back at it. I had the opportunity to do something I was really into, and potentially be really good at, but got stuck with a job no one wanted instead. And I understand now that there was a hole that needed filled, and that the newspaper staff didn’t need a surplus of photographers when there was a vacant page editor position, but from a sheerly selfish level – it sucked. I really wanted to play in the darkroom. But you get distracted doing the things you have to do, and I wound up delaying what I had actually wanted to try the whole time by more than a decade.

I’m not sure if this batch of negatives I picked up a few weeks ago in Amish country (literally – from a shop that had no electricity, and only an ancient gas heater for warmth) were shot for the high school newspaper or yearbook. My gut says yearbook, but they could well have been used for both. I bought a pile of these negatives, all 4×5, probably shot with a similar, if not identical, camera as Zarl for $3.00. I’ve only scanned in a few of the pictures so far (as I’ve mentioned before, my scanner won’t scan in the entire width of a 4×5 negative, so the scans always wind up cropped). I’m hoping to make some prints of some of the more interesting negatives and scan those in once I start doing darkroom stuff.

And some of them are pretty interesting, from a time capsule perspective. Women’s basketball! I was pleased to see evidence of it, little sailor suit-esque uniform touches notwithstanding. And did the school actually have pool tables on site? How awesome is that? I wish I could have shot pool in gym class instead of having to do square dancing (the horror…).

And this guy…

…oh man, I could make up stories for days about him!

Anyway, I sincerely hope the high school photographer who got to take these pictures had a ball at the job, and wasn’t just placed there because the school had too many news editors.

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Hi! Back from vacation!

(Yes, I took the Savoy kayaking).

Guess what happened to me a few hours after this picture was taken? I got an epically bad sunburn, and then also came down with a horrid springtime cold. In Savannah, Georgia. Where it was 90 degrees. At 9 o’clock at night. Yay, fun!

Actually, it was pretty fun, even with all of the burning and sickness. I figured I would be magically, ironically cured as soon as I got home, but no, still sick.

It’ll probably be a while before I develop any of the film from this trip. Well, I might do some black and white developing when I start feeling better. I don’t know. My main priority is to get the Temporary Darkroom of Awesomeness up and running, so we’ll see.

I did take some Lensbaby pictures, though, with the Nikon.

And scanned in a few pics taken with the Polaroid 230.

I tried shooting a lot of pictures with Zarl and Zarl, Jr. Some of them probably came out. Some of them probably didn’t. Why, you may ask? Oh, let me count the FAILS.

1. As I mentioned in the post below, at one point during the trip, Zarl’s shutter just pretty much completely stopped working except for the 1/100 setting. Of course, I was taking night shots at the time, and needed a much longer exposure. The Bulb setting was half-assedly working as a Timer setting, so I just used that and hoped it was working. Oddly, the next day, the Bulb and Timer setting went back to working correctly. So, maybe the shutter acting up had something to do with…

2. It rained on the camera. More than once.

3. When I was trying to take an infrared picture, I forgot to adjust the aperture back closed to a reasonable level (say, down to f16ish from being wide open). This happened more than once that I know of.

4. I tried taking a lot of night shots. I finally found a great, friendly light meter that I understand how to use. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help me at night. So I had no idea how long of an exposure to shoot or how wide open to leave the aperture. Wide open at a few seconds? Maybe? I hope so, because that’s pretty much what I shot all of the night pictures at.

5. Sometimes, people just randomly started talking to me when I was midway through a handful of FAILS (like a combination of 1 and 2), leading me to getting flustered and doing something stupid, like shooting a picture before I was even close to being ready.

6. At one point during the trip, I got fed up with changing out film in the film holders using my dark bag (it takes forever), so I decided to try and black out the hotel bathroom and just change out film in there, sitting on the floor next to the toilet. I placed electrical tape over the nightlight thingies and a towel under the door and got it as dark as I could. Of course, I have no way of knowing if I got the area dark enough or not until I develop the film. But I was feeling pretty pleased about it all until I emerged from the bathroom with newly loaded film holders to see a despondent Travis saying…

7. …that he just broke the shutter on Zarl Jr. He had been trying to take some pictures from the balcony of the hotel using the Century Graphic and the rollfilm back, and apparently our shutter release cable was too big for the camera, and it jammed some of the flaps in the shutter. I unscrewed the lenses from the shutter, grabbed a barrette, and managed to MacGyver it into submission. Yay! The shutter works again!

8. …but the story still has a sad ending because it turned out that something horrible happened to the film in the rollfilm back, and instead of winding properly onto the take-up spool, it contracted together into big accordion folds that I managed to expose entirely to the light because I had no idea what was going on in there. Whoops! So much for that roll of film!

9. I also set up the camera to take pictures with the infrared and ortho lith film multiple times before realizing that I didn’t have any infrared or ortho lith film actually with me to use. It was all back at the hotel.

10. And, when I finally did manage to compose a fairly nice looking shot for the infrared film with a boat and water and clouds and sky in it, and I had one last sheet of infrared film in the holder to use, it worked perfectly. I had the aperture and shutter speed set correctly, everything seemed to go smoothly… until I pulled the film holder out from the camera, and the base of it literally disintegrated. I just kind of stared at it in horror, and then slammed whatever of it I could back into the other part of the holder, and called it done. So much for that last infrared shot!

11. But the absolute best FAIL? That came during the night when Zarl’s shutter went all wonky. I set up to take one final picture of the Ravenel Bridge in Charleston. That’s the bridge in the Lensbaby picture above. You see how it’s basically two sets of triangles? At night, it’s lit up with white spotlights and looks all pretty.

So, I set up the camera, composed the shot, and was about to put the film holder in when I looked through the ground glass one last time. And… things had gone weird. I must have moved the camera or something, because I could only see half of the bridge. I move Zarl around a little, but no luck – I could still only see one set of the triangle supports.

Completely confused, I look away from the ground glass to the actual bridge. And, what do you know? One entire half of the bridge that was previously lit up had gone entirely dark, right down to the streetlights. I have no idea if it was an environmental maneuver (to save electricity, the entire bridge is only lit for an hour or so after dusk or something like that), or if some sort of power failure happened. All I knew is that it was hilariously bad timing. I snapped the shot anyway and took it as a sign to call it done for the night.

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