Monday, October 13, 2014

The WC: It's Not Just For You Know What Anymore

The training continues.
No, not the laziness drills, I'm pretty much world class in that department.
I haven't been in a photographic darkroom in oh, since back in another life and some stuff is slow to remember.
Some stuff is totally new.
Well, new to me anyways:

























I took home one of the enlargers from work, no worry it's so old it's been off the books for a while, and believe it or not it fits in the bathroom.
Sort of cramped but workable.
The smaller enlarger will only do 35mm film, I only have one negative holder, while the bigger one will do larger formats like 6x7.
One of the problems with working in the bathroom is I need to seal off the window and it gets pretty warm once I get going.
I've also started messing with sepia toner and well, it's nasty smelling stuff.
Thing is I need the bathroom for there's a lot of rinsing and washing involved.
Sepia?
It's the stuff that gives photographs that brownish look:


















That's a contact print, made by laying the 4x5 negative directly on the paper.
The enlarger doesn't handle large format negatives.



































Those are scans compared to scans of the an actual print.
I would like the images to be a bit darker, the directions actually say to print darker, but these were just tests anyways.
I did do one night shot:



















Which I think came out fantabulously well.
I did more prints and I'll be toning them later.
These do take a bit o'time as you need to bleach the original, rinse, then tone and fix.  The whole process takes oh about fifteen or twenty minutes depending on how well you rinse and wash.
In my case in the bathroom sink and in the tub.
Thankfully water is included in my fees here and you can rinse out more than one at a time.
I've also been collecting some picture frames:



















Hitting up the local Goodwill.
I'm gonna start to recycle them and mount some of the work like this:



















The walls at the Flat Tire Command Center are all still blank so I got lots of space to hang stuff.
I may even try to put some of the smaller ones up on Etsy and see if they get any attention.
This photography stuff needs to start paying for itself.
If you know what I mean.
In other news, following the lead of our friend Steve A, I too got a new hat.
Make that hats.
More on this later.

3 comments:

Steve A said...

What about the kiln?

limom said...

The kiln in still in storage and no, it won't fit in the bathroom.

GreenComotion said...

Great idea to get the picture frames from Goodwill. Great idea!

Peace :)