It has been almost three and a half years. Three and a half years since I have had the darkroom set up. Three and a half years since coming to the realization that having the camera gear and not using it was making me feel guilty right in the middle of getting through Faith's death. Three and a half years since I sold all of my camera gear. Fortunately, no one bought the darkroom gear and I knew I would eventually set things up again so I stored it away.
For right now. Wednesday I rearranged the old bedroom to provide an empty wall against which I placed the entire contents of my walk-in closet. I then set the darkroom up. Thursday I got it up and running, test gear and such. Today, I discovered a very fortunate and unforeseen choice. I covered the window on the front of the house with an old dark red bed sheet. It is folded three times and stapled to the sill.
When I went in today to make sure the room was light tight I noticed two things. First, the curtain with the bright and direct afternoon sun on it made a red safelight for the whole room. Secondly, It was REALLY bright in there. So I ran a test strip to test for fogging. With the lights out and only the red from the window, I exposed a cut strip of photographic paper a section at a time. 5 minutes, 2 minutes, and three more sections for one minute. This way I had a test strip that had been exposed for 10-5-3-2-1 minutes and depending on where the paper showed it was getting darker would be the time limit that the paper could be out in the room before the light in the room, what there was, would fog the paper.
Don't you know, there was nothing on the paper at all? Safe for at least 10 minutes out in the open.
Tomorrow is Sunday and tomorrow I get back into the pool. I have selected the first negative I am going to print. It is a copy of an old print of a friend's mother on her motorcycle. I did not know if it would work when I took the photographs five years ago. But I found them in the inside over of my negative book and put the best looking one into the enlarger. When I focused it the negative image looked really good. Good enough to try. My initial fear had been that the negative would not be sharp enough to do any meaningful work with. But looking at it, it has great tonal range and it looked very sharp in focus. Definitely worth a go. Hope it turns out well.
My intent is to finally get back into photography wholesale. I was rereading an old Black and White Photography magazine from the UK. A favorite columnist, Mike Johnston, was writing about his own version at the time of the Photography Blues. He said something that I may never now forget. "Photography is not something you think about. It is something you do." Well, for at least seven and a half years I have done MUCH MORE thinking about photography than doing. Time to live up to a favorite movie quote. "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'."
Time to live.
No comments:
Post a Comment