I’m getting better at making prints, and starting to understand how all the bits fit together properly. I’m finding myself disappointed that I’ve shot colour sometimes :)
The light-sealing of the darkroom (also known as laundry (also known as brewery)) is not exactly pretty… but it does work:
I managed to light seal the Laundry (not pretty… but it worked) and started playing with one of the enlargers I bought recently. I had a bit of an inkling from some reading I did ages ago about what I had to do to make prints.
I didn’t really have any developer meant for prints… so I just grabbed some Rodinal and dived right in. Basically started with the lens wide open and around 0.5 to 1 seconds exposure.
Because I was just experimenting, I skipped a stop bath (did a rinse though) and then straight into some fixer.
Here are the results of my experimentation (photos taken with my phone of the drying prints)
Contrast these with the scans of the negatives:
On advice from one of the guys at Vanbar (the “local” – meaning still a drive away, but at least in the same city – place for photographic chemicals) I tried stand development for the roll of Efke 25 I had shot at Burning Man.
Stand development differs from normal B&W film development in that a) it takes longer and b) you don’t agitate. You just leave the film sitting in the chemicals for a while…. in this case, one hour. I used Rodinal, which is a pretty nice, easy to use and versatile developer (incidentally, it’s also the oldest photographic chemical still sold and in use – patented in 1891).
Anyway, I got some good images out of it (I think). Here are some from a roll of Lucky 100SHD I shot:
and here’s some from the Efke 25 that I shot at Burning Man:
So, I discovered that my D200 had a built in “multiple exposure” option. While you can do exactly the same thing in GIMP (or Photoshop I guess) a whole lot easier (for one, you get to see what’s gonig on), we had been discussing Holga earlier in the night… so I felt it kind of appropriate to not really see what I was doing.
Leah playing guitar hero, me sitting across the room only slightly distracting her with a camera.
Maybe I will end up getting a Holga one of these days… being restricted can be fun.
Just before Christmas, I bought myself a new stereo. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and one of those things that takes some care in looking at because it’s a non-trivial amount of cash.
I’ve ended up with B&W 683 speakers, an Arcam amplifier and CD player (Tivoli HiFi had a special on saving about $800+ on the amp and CD when bought with speakers).
The basic summary is that this sounds awesome. Tool especially sounds awesome. The only real downside is that i’m starting to get really used to this as the standard of audio I listen to.
Even better, no complaints from neighbours (yet).