Craft! Bang! Boom!

So, I got an enlarger. The good people at Columbus Camera Group were able to hook me up with one that should be able to do pretty much everything I would ever need an enlarger to do. If you’re in the Midwest and need any camera equipment, go to CCG. They’ve got a great selection of used equipment available, and the people there are great to work with (Thanks John!).

My new enlarger is an Omega Super Chromega D. It is, laughably, almost as tall as I am. It takes up half of the bathroom (where I set up my darkroom). I’ve got it on a rolling cart to move it in and out of the bathroom.

Honestly, I was pretty dubious about this enlarger for the first day having it. Compared to what I was using before, this one is frightening. It has all sorts of knobs and levers and dials and weird, mysterious boxes called ‘Mixing Chambers.’ I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to figure out how to use it, or if I’d even like using it.

Travis and I took the day yesterday to take the Chromega for a test drive. After some frustrations and rampant Googling, we were finally able to figure out how to make almost everything work.

So, what can I do with this behemoth? I can make enlargements in both black and white and color. It has a built-in color filtration dial system, so I don’t have to mess with any separate filters, either for color or for printing on multigrade black and white paper. That’s pretty nifty, but maybe even niftier is that this is a 4×5 enlarger – I can enlarge negatives from 35mm up to 4×5. Which is awesome, because my scanner can only scan in about 2/3 of a 4×5 neg, and the only other way to see what the whole image looks like was to make a contact print.

The Chromega came with 3 lenses – one for 35mm, one for medium format film, and one for large format. The only thing we can’t quite get to work is the lens for enlarging the 35mm. No big deal, though, since we figured out we could use the medium format lens, and still get an 8×10 (at least) enlargement. The Chromega also came with 3 negative carriers – 35mm, 6×6 (square, 120), and 4×5. After a little bit of getting crafty with the scissors and cardboard, I was able to whip up a negative mask for 3×4 film, so trying to make prints of other formats of film, like 126 or 127, shouldn’t be any big deal.

This enlarger is about a million times better than my old, retro-cool Federal enlarger. I can actually get things in focus! And make enlargements bigger than 5×7! And actually be able to print out deep, dark blacks! Turns out all of my print-making issues were due to my crappy enlarger.

We went to the Columbus Zoo this week, partly as an excuse for me to shoot a ton of Kodachrome film and other various weird 35mm film. I used my Canon AE-1 with the telephoto lens pretty exclusively. When we got back, I developed a roll of expired (from 1998) Kodak High Speed Infrared film, which was a new film to me. It was discontinued by Kodak a few years back, but was considered to be the holy grail of black and white infrared.

When I scanned in my film from that roll, I was astonished, because all of the images looked like complete crap. I figured it had something to do with the age of the film and the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing with it. However, when we were messing around with the enlarger, I threw one of the infrared negatives into the carrier to see if it printed out as crappy as it had looked on the computer.

It looks about a million times better printed out than the scan had looked. I couldn’t believe it.

Travis wanted to see what some of the older paper looked like, so we did a few prints using Kodak Medalist F-2 that expired in 1969. I wasn’t really hopeful, considering the bad results I had had using the old enlarging paper with the other enlarger, but once again, the finished print far exceeded expectations.

Today I gave color printing (RA-4) another go. I still have a long way to go in figuring out exactly what I’m doing with the RA-4 process (especially since my chems seem to exhaust so quickly – I must be doing something wrong), but I managed to get an okay color enlargement…

…a better color enlargement…

…and a random leaf photogram printed out.

I also did some lith prints this past weekend (using the contact printer and some old papers), if I get motivated enough I’ll post about that, too.

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Went back in the darkroom today to try out more of my old papers. I wanted to get through my open packs of contact paper, so that was first.

Unfortunately, the first paper I tried was a complete FAIL – of course, it was one of the things I was really hoping would turn out. It was Agfa Deckled Cykon contact paper that expired in 1940. Since it was one of only a few non-Kodak papers I have, I was curious how it would turn out, but no go. All three attempts were horribly fogged. I’ve got 2 1/2 sheets left, and they’re destined for lumen prints.

The Kodak Azo from 1956 worked without any problems. 5 second exposure and a 50 second developing time:

The last of the opened packages of contact paper (besides the postcards, which won’t fit on my contact printer and I don’t want to cut up) was a big box of Kodak Velox F-3 that expired in 1946. The paper size is 4×6, which was a little awkward – I had to trim off an edge to get it to fit on the printer.

This paper concerned me when I opened up the box, since the paper inside isn’t shielded by any interior protection (thick black paper, for instance, which was the standard in Kodak packaging of that time period). Instead, it’s just a stack of paper in a brown box. The edges of the paper have all oxidized or fogged or something – all of the edges are this cool dark gold shiny color now. It’s kind of neat.

Surprisingly, I had no problems printing it. I didn’t get an image on the gold areas, but the center of the paper worked fine.

Here’s a contact print made from a found glass plate negative (I’m sneaking a little Found Friday at you!). 3 second exposure, 1 minute in the developer:

Since I had finished trying out my opened packages of contact paper, I moved along to the opened packages of enlarging paper, despite my qualms with my enlarger. The first paper I tried, Kodak Medalist F-2 from 1969, worked okay, albeit it pretty low contrast:

After that point, it all went to hell. I had a box of Kodak lantern slide plates, which should, in theory, produce a glass plate transparency. The speed of the plates is supposed to be 7x that of Kodabromide. So, it made sense to try making a print on Kodabromide first, and then using the exposure from that to see what I should use as the exposure time on the glass plates.

The first pack, despite it having the message “GOOD PAPER DO NOT OPEN IN LIGHT!” written emphatically across it in purple crayon, seemed to be completely fogged. No big deal – it expired in 1952, and it seemed like there was only a few sheets left in it anyway.

The second pack, which expired in 1976, fared a little better. I made a few contact strips with it, but it still seemed excessively low contrast.

I went ahead and tried making an exposure on the lantern slide plates anyway. The first time, I had inadvertently exposed two slide plates that were stuck together. Of course, nothing came out. The second try, all I got was a big fogged mess.

So, either the Kodabromides (the ones I tried, at least) and the lantern plates are trashed and destined for the lumen pile, or they just don’t want to play well with my Clayton developer. I’m setting them aside for right now until I mix up a different brand of developer.

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So, I recently went through my stash of photo paper and inventoried what the heck I had. Turns out, it’s a lot! I’ve got a fair amount of weird shit in there. Today, since I’m having a little bit of enlarger angst, I decided to try making some contact prints to see if any of it was still any good.

To do so, I used my trusty Kodak Photo Hobby contact printer.

The side of the printer says to use a 15 watt frosted lamp for Velox paper, so that’s what I went ahead and put in it.

The photo hobby printer is pretty small – the biggest size paper it can do is 4×5. So I just went ahead and used the tiny trays that came with the printer for my chems.

Since I could fit those by my sink, I was able to just have the contact printer, paper, and negative binder on the other side.

It was nice to be able to spread out a bit. When I’m working with bigger paper, I have to use the bigger trays and the enlarger, and I have a lot less room to work with.

What was also nice was that since I was working with mainly old, slow paper, I used an amber colored safelight instead of my normal dark red one. I also didn’t bother covering up the bathroom doorway with the big, heavy black-out curtain. I figured the little bit of light seeping in through the doorway wouldn’t hurt anything (and the curtain is near impossible to deal with if I’m moving in and out of the bathroom – I have to wrestle it down in order to open the door).

Here’s some of the paper I experimented with:

Expiration dates on the paper ranged from 1938 to 1974. All of the packets of paper had already been opened when I got them, and of course, I have no idea how they had been stored. I’ve just been keeping them in my back bedroom at room temp – I figured after decades, how much worse could that be for them? All of the papers are supposed to work for contact printing, although a few (the Opal and Portrait Proof) say they are for enlarging or “fast contact printing.”

The first thing I did, since I hadn’t used any of my printing chems in months, was to check and see if they still worked. I didn’t really feel like mixing up new chems if I didn’t have to. So I took a piece of newish (as in, I purchased new two years ago) Arista.edu photo paper, and briefly exposed it with the contact printer. Since the Arista photo paper is made for enlarging and not contact printing (enlarging paper is much faster than contact printing paper – photographic paper has speed ratings, too, just like film), I figured even just the briefest flash of contact printing light should make for a severely overexposed image. I dipped it in the developer and the paper turned black almost instantly – which was a good thing, since it meant my developer still worked.

The developer I was using is Clayton brand, not exactly this product, since I mixed it from a powder, but the same brand. This concerned me a little, since all of the papers I was using had different developer recommendations, but I figured all I could do was to try it out and see if it worked.

Things didn’t start out incredibly keen, but not a complete disaster. The first paper I tried out was Glossy Velox F-2. It expired in February 1938. It turned out there were only two sheets of paper inside, and I went ahead and tried printing on both. Here’s the best result:

It almost worked! You can kind of see part of the image I tried to print, but I got that weird black creeping crud all over the rest of the image. Anyway, both images were failures, and I used up the pack of paper. On to the next paper.

The next thing I tried was Azo E-3. It’s a double weight paper, which means it’s thick and sturdy. It expired in October, 1944. I only had a few sheets of this left, too. It’s 5×7, so I had to cut the paper in half to get it to fit on the contact printer. Anyway, this one actually worked relatively well! Here’s a 10 second exposure that was in the developer for 5 minutes:

And here’s a 12 second exposure that was in the developer for 4.5 minutes:

I wound up with only one sheet of the Azo E-3 left, so I’ll have to save that for something interesting.

I decided to switch it up with the Velox and try a newer package to see if that was in any better condition than the first one I tried. So, I found a small pack of 2.5×3.5 Velox F-2 that expired in December 1974. The first exposure I made with it was 5 seconds long, and that turned out to be way, way overexposed. So I dialed it back to 3 second exposures, and had the paper in the developer for about 1 minute, 20 seconds. Here’s one of the prints on Velox from a found negative:

And here’s one from a pinhole pic I shot a while ago:

The contact printing was going a lot quicker than I imagined it, so I rifled through the paper stash and pulled out some papers that were labeled as being for “enlarging or fast contact.” I figured since the paper was old, it may have slowed down some, and I was probably good to go ahead and try it in the contact printer.

The first one I tried was Kodak Portrait Proof R single weight paper that expired in 1958. This paper was supposed to be 5×7, but the original owner seems to have cut all the sheets of paper in half. Which is a little weird, but saved me the trouble of having to trim down one of the pieces of paper. What is interesting about this paper was that it has a tweed surface, which is kind of rare.

I used a 3 second exposure on the first attempt, which proved to be way too long, and then a 1 second exposure on the second try. It was still too long of an exposure, though, and the picture came out ridiculously dark, albeit with a cool dark brown tone.

Anyway, the paper still seems to work, but is probably better off being used as an enlarging paper rather than a contact paper.

The other paper in this category was Kodak’s double weight Opal Z. This was one of the papers I’ve been most looking forward to trying out, and it didn’t disappoint. This pack of paper expired in 1966, and was billed as having an “old ivory, lustre, tapestry” surface. Neat! The paper size is 8×10, but there were a few smaller pieces inside, and maybe two or three larger pieces. I worked with the small pieces.

After seeing the Portrait Proof paper come out overexposed, I decided to only use a one second exposure time for the Opal.

Pretty freaking neat, right? I really loved the Opal, but, like the Portrait Proof, I think it would probably work better as an enlarging paper. Since I only have a few sheets left, I’m going to save it to try it with the enlarger.

I had a pack of paper that I had wrapped in tin foil at some point, and promptly forgotten what the heck it was. It turned out to be a pack of Kodak Azo G-3 from the 1940s in a torn-apart package. Seriously, it looked like a mouse had been nibbling on it at some point. I gave it a go, first with a ten second exposure, and then a 2 second exposure.

Yeah. The paper is pretty fogged beyond use. The Azo G-3 is going in the lumen pile.

The other paper that wound up going in the lumen pile is a big box of Kodak Velox F-3 that expired in 1944. I had high hopes for this, since the box was in pretty good shape, and heavy – it originally held 144 sheets of paper, and probably over 100 remain. Unfortunately, either the paper refuses to work in the Clayton chemistry, or, more likely, is completely fogged. Oh well. It’ll be good for lumens, anyway.

I had two more packs of Velox that had been opened – each pack was 2.75 x 4.5 inches. The F-2 (for normal contrast negatives) expired in 1955. The other pack, F-4 (for very low contrast negatives) expired in 1964.

Here’s the F-2, done with a 3 second exposure:

The F-4 seems to work as well, but I didn’t really get a good print with it, since the paper drifted on me when I closed the contact printer (my negative was 4×5, and my paper smaller, so it cropped weird). But, still, it’s an image, albeit a messy one.

That was the end of my contact printing marathon, and all in all, I’m really pleased with the results. Only a few packs were trashed, and even then, I can probably still use the paper in lumen prints (I’ll probably try that out tomorrow).

Overall, so far, the rule of thumb seems to be that if the paper is in the yellow Kodak packaging, it’s probably still going to work. If it’s in the brown Kodak packaging, well… there’s probably a good chance it’s gotten fogged.

I still have a bunch more paper I need to test. I didn’t quite make it through all of my contact paper. I still have some opened Azo Grade B No. 2 (1940), Azo E Grade 3 postcards (1935), Velox F-3 (mid 1940s), Azo F-2 (1956), and Agfa Cykon Code 2 (1940). Then, I also have unopened packages of Velox F-2 (1971 – this is an adorable little package of 2.5 x 2.5 sheets), Velox F-2 (1962), Velvet Velox No. 2 (1935), Velox F No. 3 (1943), Glossy Velox No. 2 (1933 – probably my oldest paper, and in an immaculate package – it looks brand new), a box of 100 sheets of Velite probably from the early 1960s, a pack of Opal Y (hooray! Although I’ll probably use it for enlarging, not contact printing – 1958), and probably the rarest paper in my collection, Marvel contact printing paper, made by Sears Roebuck (1946). And that’s not even getting into all of the enlarging paper…

Anyway, the point is, decades old paper seems to work more often than not, so don’t be afraid to try it out if you should run across any. I’ll keep you updated.

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Yesterday I finally got up the nerve to try out my RA-4 chems. RA-4 is the process used to develop color paper. Normally with color printing, you use a color enlarger, and a color analyzer, if you have it. I don’t have either, so instead, I just tried making color prints with my regular enlarger, which is pretty old-school – circa 1950s, I think.

Mixing up the chems was just like mixing up a batch of C-41 chems. You wind up with two solutions: developer and Blix. I bought a big honking kit from Freestyle last time I placed an order – it’s supposed to yield 4 liters – but only mixed up 250 ml, since I didn’t know how well the process would go.

The thing about developing color paper is that it has to be done in total darkness. You can’t even have a dim red safelight on. Because of that, color paper is typically not developed in trays, like black and white paper, but in rotary processing tubes, like these:

So, great! I could set up my enlarger and have my tube ready to accept the paper, and then switch off the light, get the paper out of the box, expose it, stick it in the tube, and then flip on the light and take it into the kitchen (where I had the motor base for the tubes set up) and develop it there.

Another difference about color paper processing is that, like color film processing, you’re working with chems at higher temps than black and white. Fortunately, the instructions for the RA-4 kit came with a bunch of time and temperature equivalencies, so instead of freaking out and trying to keep such a small amount of fluids at 102 degrees, I was able to work with them between 75 and 85 degrees.

The first thing I decided to do was a contact sheet of some cross processed Kodak E100G 120 film. I tore some of my paper in half, set the negatives on top, and exposed under the enlarger in increments of 2 seconds. Then I ran it through the developing process (which is quick – 5 minutes or less, depending on your temps). When I was done, I got this:

Not bad, right! Sure, there’s the weird flare on the left side (I think that came from the plastic sleeve the negatives were in), but besides that, I really loved the tones I got. So, I was all excited. Color paper developing rocks!

Unfortunately, that was the best thing I developed all day. The next thing I tried to do was make an enlargement, and that turned out to be an epic fail. My paper came out almost entirely black, and I stared at it helplessly for a few moments before I finally figured out – I think – what was happening.

It’s my enlarger. Despite the fact that my enlarger is retro-50s cool, it is very flawed in that it only came with one negative carrier that actually fits in it properly. I have a few other negative carriers, but they’re very thin, and when I use them, a lot of light leaks out from around the negative carrier. I tried using one of the thin negative carriers to make the enlargement, and I think what happened is that enough light leaked out to fog the paper. In retrospect, I bet that has probably happened when I’ve made black and white prints, too, but since it was black and white paper (and probably less sensitive), I didn’t realize what was going on and just blamed the quality of the negative.

So, I went back to contact prints. I placed a cross processed 4×5 negative on a piece of paper and exposed it, and got a print that was very much cyan and dark orange toned. It wasn’t anywhere near the colors in the first contact print, but it was Fuji film, not Kodak, so I wasn’t sure if the different color tones had anything to do with that.

The next thing I did was trying to do a contact print of some regularly processed C-41 negs. Here’s what I got:

Erm. Yeah. That doesn’t look especially keen, does it? That was even more cyan than the Fuji X-pro’d film.

At this point I started to wonder if I had contaminated my developer with Blix. I don’t know the answer to that, but I suspect… maybe? I was using the same tube to develop all of the papers, so maybe I didn’t rinse it out well enough after the first bit of paper. I know none of the other stuff I tried to develop even came close to the color vibrancy of the first contact print. Also, there’s the whole thing about me not having a color enlarger, which apparently makes two tons of difference.

Because here’s the thing about color film: you know how color film negatives have that heavy orange cast to them? You want to know why that is? It’s to cover up flaws in the color balance. Apparently, it’s near impossible to have consistency from one batch of film to the next, so the little differences in color film are always corrected in the printing stage, with color enlargers that you can shift the balance of yellow, red, and cyan. Which leads me to this: there’s no right or wrong way to scan in color film. There are a lot of anti-Photoshop people in the analog film groups on Flickr, but the whole functionality of color film is dependent on someone altering the colors in the printing phase – whether it’s someone at a lab doing that with a color enlarger, or some kid at home doing it in Photoshop, the end result is the same. When it comes right down to it, Photoshop is just another tool people use because it’s easy, and accessible. It’s not evil. It doesn’t want to kill photography.

All that being said, and despite the problems I had with my first day of RA-4 printing, there just is something magical about making a print on photo paper, even in spite of (or at times because of) my poor equipment and possibly contaminated chems. Oh, also, I think my color paper expired about 10 years ago, too. But still! Magical! Because I wound up making this little contact print by accident:

…which, frankly, I think turned out pretty freaking neat. This is a contact print of a black and white negative (Fuji Acros film) printed onto color paper. I think I got the softness because the negative was in its plastic sleeve, and wasn’t laying perfectly flat on the paper. It’s like an accidental Orton!

(btw – the Orton effect is something that is easily done using slide film and making a few exposures. Or, you can just Photoshop it after the effect, which is something I do all the time, because I love the Orton look. It’s a gimmick, sure, but I love how glowy it makes pictures look).

Anyway, the first day of RA-4 printing wasn’t exactly a success, but not exactly a failure, either. I think my number one revelation was that I probably need to start looking for a new enlarger that’s not archaic. I also may try to be a bit more vigilant about avoiding cross contamination with my chems next time, too, just in case that led to some of the weirdness issues. I’ll probably put more RA-4 printing on hold until I can sort out my enlarger situation.

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Don’t say I never gave you anything.

I think I mentioned a while ago on here that in the crazy camera auction hedonism of the past summer, one of the things I managed to score was a big box of photo paper. It was a big, open, cardboard box filled with what looked to be sheets and sheets of unexposed photo paper. I was the only person with any interest in it, since obviously the paper had been exposed to the light and wasn’t good for printing anymore (also, there was no notes as to what type of paper it was anyway). But, of course, since I know you can make lumen prints with even the most fogged and badly stored photo papers, the box wound up coming home with me. I made a few test lumens just to see if the paper worked (it did), and then I shoved the rest inside a black garbage bag.

Fast forward to today, when I decide to try making some lumen prints using paper larger than 8×10. I remembered that some of the exposed box paper was 11×14, so I stuck my hand inside the garbage bag, and pulled out… a naked woman. That hasn’t happened to me since Vegas!

So, yeah, apparently in this big stack of photo paper (which was standing upright at the auction, not flat), there’s a bunch of already processed prints, about half of which are nude pictures. I know I didn’t think to flip through the paper at the auction, mainly because I didn’t want to expose more of the photo paper to the light than already was showing, but it’s kind of funny that no one else, at least that I saw, did either.

Anyway, I’ll be keeping the naked pics off the intertubes, except for maybe one of them, just because that one is a combo of making an enlargement of a negative and also making a photogram. It’s kind of neat. If I upload that, I’ll censor out the model’s face and naughty bits, though.

Here’s another photo from the same batch. The model in this photo is not the same as the model in the nude pics, fyi.

Some of the (non-nude) prints were done on a really odd paper. It actually feels more fabric than paper, so I’m wondering if it’s maybe linen based. Unfortunately, since these photos are larger than my scanner, I’ll only be able to scan in a cropped image.

I’m also in the middle of doing an inventory of photographic paper stash. I have a huge amount of it, and besides a few boxes of new stuff, almost everything is from the 1940s-1970s. So, I’m going to figure out what I have, do some research on how to use it, and start sampling the various papers. I figure anything that doesn’t produce a good print can just go in the lumen pile. I also found out that I probably need to get a different safelight filter. I’ve been using a standard red safelight for darkroom stuff, but I see that I’ve got a bunch of chloride based contact printing papers, and apparently those need a green safelight. I may need to get my hands on some of the older style chems for paper developer, too.

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Two posts in one day after not posting in months. It’s how I roll.

This is what a tithonia flower looks like:

(Incidentally, this is one of the last photos I took before the Nikon D40 died. Cropped, but otherwise unPhotoshopped. Do you see why I love this camera?)

Tithonias are one of my favorite flowers. They’re also called Mexican sunflowers. You plant the seeds in late spring, after all danger of frost (or start them inside and transplant, which I’ve had better luck with) and then you wait and wait and wait all summer while a massive green leafy plant grows. And grows. And grows to the point where it’s higher than your gutters, which is cool and kind of intimidating. Tithonias – they’re not a small plant. And you’re impatient during this time, because the plant is a damn bee, butterfly, and hummingbird magnet, and it would be cool if it decided to bloom SOMETIME THIS SUMMER!!

Mid-August, I went outside to yell at the tithonia plants, ordering to bloom already for the love of god (this actually happened), and not two hours later I looked outside to see the first happy orange flower had opened.

After that, blooms opened in a cascade, and lo, the bees and butterflies and hummingbirds came en masse.

Two of our tithonia plants fell over into the yard while we were on vacation, but they’re still kicking, contentedly growing horizontally and being a big happy obstacle for the dog to jump over when she goes outside. Today I plucked off one of the branches and tried to lumen it.

Tithonia flowers are pretty thick, so I was concerned as to how well it would lumen. Also, today has been cold (mid 50s, maybe?) and cloudy. So I wasn’t really expecting much when I plopped the tithonia down on the sheet of Kodak Kodabromide F4 that expired in 1955.

But still, a few hours later, look what we have:

Not bad! This was scanned in before fixing, since I tried to do a weird thing with the fixer, and I’m dubious as to whether it actually worked.

Anyway, I got my Photoshop on making some different versions of the lumen print.

I really liked this one, especially:

But I finally altered it to a point almost beyond recognition to the original print:

I have no idea how I got there, but I like the end result.

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Yeah, I know, I haven’t posted lately. That happens. Sometimes I just hate communicating with the outside world (in real life, I’m pretty stunningly anti-social). I burned out a little bit on photography for a while, which also happens. Went on vacation, and hardly shot any pictures at all, despite the 14 tons of film I lugged around. The stars just weren’t aligned. Also, my beloved Nikon D40 broke a few days into the trip. It’s a shutter issue. I’m not too disappointed, as it’s 3 years old and has shot, quite likely, hundreds of thousands of pictures, but still: a bit of a bummer. Haven’t contacted a Nikon repair person yet to see how much it will cost to repair, but I may be looking at a new Nikon sometime in the future. I don’t really want to spend the money on one, but frankly, the Canon Powershot SX1IS that we also have just doesn’t even come close to the picture quality I got from the D40, even though it’s a few years newer. Not that the Powershot isn’t a good camera, it is, but we tend to use it primarily for its telephoto zoom than anything else.

So, the Nikon died, and the vacation wound up just not being a great one for photos (although I did manage to shoot off a roll of color infrared slide film when we were in Montreal! Potential win!). Conditions were weird, and I felt more like hanging out in the camper knitting than trying to force pictures that just weren’t there.

One of the things we did wind up doing on vacation was hitting up an awesome used book store in Middlebury, Vermont called Monroe Street Books. If we hadn’t had poor Bela waiting for us out in the truck, I think Travis and I both could have spent, oh, a few days inside. As is, we walked out over a $100 poorer, but with a cardboard box full of books and magazines (including, for Travis, a first edition of Michael Jackson’s – the beer guy, not the other Michael Jackson – World Guide to Beer).

I found the photography section at the end, maybe 5 minutes or so before we checked out, and wound up just tossing a few books into the pile based on just a glance. Ansel Adam’s ‘The Negative’? Sure, we’ll get that. Back issues of American Photography from 1938? Could be useful! Travis held up a book with a photo of darkroom equipment on the cover to show me, and without even opening it up, I nodded okay. We were drunk on the used books, and even though I hadn’t felt like doing any photography stuff in the past month or so, I couldn’t stop myself from buying them.

I paged through the old American Photography magazines at the camper, and each issue has at least one article in it that, even though it comes from a magazine over 70 years old, is still relevant now.

I didn’t start flipping through the Ansel Adams book until I got home, but it looks to be uber-technical, which, of course. It’s Ansel freaking Adams. I might be in the mindset at some time to concentrate and read through the book, but right now… no. It got set aside for a later day.

The big win, however, was the book I barely glanced at in the shop, the red book with the photo of the darkroom equipment on the cover. It’s ‘The Darkroom Handbook’ by Michael Langford. It looks like it’s out of print, but used copies were readily available at Amazon. I have to say, after going through this book, if you have any interest at all in doing anything with photographic paper beyond making a simple black and white print, you need this book. If you have any interest in making color prints or doing anything with color paper, you need this book. Seriously. Buy the hell out of it. It’s completely amazing and inspiring. I haven’t felt like doing anything with film or photo paper or cameras at all in the past few months, and I can open this book up to any page and it makes me want to burrow in a darkroom for days just to play.

I really like that it spends just as much time exploring the possibilities of color paper as it does with black and white. I still haven’t tried making any color prints yet, but damn! Now I have a million things I want to try with it. There are techniques that go back and forth, too – making prints on color paper with black and white negatives, using color slides to make black and white negatives or prints, toning black and white negatives with color and printing on color paper, etc. It’s all awesome! The edition I have was printed in 1981, and I’m sure there are chemicals and supplies that aren’t available anymore, but that doesn’t even matter, really. This book is all about showing the possibilities that exist, and by doing so, nudging you to go explore on your own.

So, for the first time in months, I have a few lumen prints going outside, which is nice, but nicer still is that I’m inspired to start doing darkroom stuff again. Maybe that’ll happen!

eta – I can’t believe I forgot to mention this! So, I was on vacation, camping, for a few weeks (as I’m wont to do), and the internet access we had was spotty and/or inaccessible. Also, my netbook isn’t set up to receive emails to all of my email address (I have a ridiculous amount of them). As is, I didn’t get any Flickr notifications until after I got home.

I haven’t been on Flickr in about a month, due to my photography malaise, so when I did have internet on vacation, I didn’t think to check my Flickr page. So, I didn’t receive the following Flickrmail until a few days after they were sent.

I received two from the same person, someone I don’t know and can’t ever having remembered encountered, either online or in real life. The two Flickrmails were sent twenty minutes apart, the newest one being titled READ THIS FIRST PLEASE. Bemused, I opened it up to see an apology from this person for having accused me of copying their photo. They said they had written the first mail before checking their version of the photo first, and could now see that the two were different.

Okay… No big deal – the person hadn’t left any comments on the actual Flickr photo page (or if they had, they had deleted them), and had only contacted me privately about it to begin with. But of course, I had to open up the first Flickr mail to see what it had said.

Just for context, here’s the photo in question:

In the caption to the photo, I mention that it was an HDR image from a single RAW image. The photo was put on Flickr in April 2008, and all of the exif data is available to view.

Here’s the original Flickrmail I got accusing me of stealing the photo from this person (name omitted to protect the confused):

“I came across your photo entitled Blue House while I was Google mapping just earlier, and I have to say, I like how you colored it, since originally, it was a black and white photo. You even cropped the cars out of it, and as a result, it looks very nice.

The only thing is, that photo was not taken by you, Ms. Vance-Kuss, as you have asserted in the comments below, but by me. I did it for a Basic Photography class in high school during the fall/winter part of my senior year. I do not appreciate that you have falsely claimed the photo to be yours, however, I am not so petty as to make you take down something that you, too, have put your time and effort into. If you do not believe me, I have the negative (and the original photo somewhere that I developed) to prove it.

As such, I’m simply requesting that you give me some credit in the caption below for the original photograph. Also, I would like to know how you managed to get a hold of my photograph as well.

Thank you for you time,
XXXXX”

So… just to be clear… this person saw my color, HDR, digital photo of a house in full public view on Flickr, a photo that has gotten a grand total of 148 views, that I posted over 2 years ago, and immediately thought that:

1. I have somehow seen this person’s black and white photo of the same house.
2. I managed to get my hands on either the print or the negative in some nefarious way.
3. I magically erased the vehicles in the original photo. (in 2008, without the newest version of Photoshop)
4. I colorized the entire thing.
5. I somehow made it magically HDR-y, despite only having a single black and white print of negative to work with.
6. I faked all of the exif data in the file to show up on Flickr like I had actually shot the photo.
7. And I posted it online. Two years ago. For absolutely no financial gain or any other motivation I can discern.

Awesome. Best accusation of copyright violation EVER! Also, I wish I was that freaking good with Photoshop.

Anyway, moral of the story is, don’t accuse someone of stealing your work unless you, oh, I don’t know, maybe actually check what your source material is first? Otherwise, you look like a doofus.

I didn’t write the person back, primarily because I’m still actively going through an anti-social phase – anything I wrote in response to this person, even though no harm was done, was bound to sound psycho. I’m not a professional photographer by any stretch, but still, I have at least a small reputation I’d like to keep intact. So in lieu of sending this person a WTF were you thinking?! Flickrmail that makes me sound crazycakes, I figured I’d just post about it here. Because really, it was pretty funny.

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