Back to Developing Film

After a week of family visiting, I was able to finally get back in to the darkroom! I got 3 more rolls of film done yesterday. I'm amazed how some of my older film still develops out so good. I always kept it stored in my office drawer, which was always kept in the middle of the room - not near a window or any other heat source, so that must have really helped.

I will go back and make contact sheets for the rest of the developed film. Then I still have about 6 rolls from my son, who uses all sorts of the film speeds, which means changing times for developing: everything from 3200 to 100!!

I did receive the replacement bulbs for the Beseler and replaced it. Now it's back to darkroom!

My First Good Print!

I've been in the darkroom......figuring out the correct timing on the Beseler enlarger. Started to print.....and the bulb dies on me. So, I go online and order two replacement bulbs to have on hand, which of course won't be here until Friday at best. And I move on to the other enlarger, the Vivitar (good thing I had two!) So basically, I needed to start from scratch as I hadn't used the Vivitar as yet. The guy I bought both enlargers from said he used the Vivitar the majority of the time. And I've only used Beselers.

I have to admit, I had to quit for a few minutes and read up again on the test strip for the print (not to be confused with the test strip for the contact sheet). So I guess there's more than one way to do the test strip. I ended up trying it the way it was described in my 'step-by-step' book, which was to expose the entire strip for 5 seconds; move the card 1/5 of the way and expose for 5 seconds; 10 seconds; 20 seconds; and 40 seconds. That seemed to work out better at f5.6. That only took about two hours with all the practice strips I did and two previous prints. The print I was making was of the Lone Pine in Monterey. Voila!! I have to say it's not perfect and could use some burning in the upper right corner - but this is alot better than my first try.

In the meantime of me washing this print, my dog starts barking outside the darkroom and is chasing this 2" black bumble bee in the studio! She's chasing it and I'm screaming and getting the chills every time it flies past me. So I had to run upstairs and grab a fly swatter, and of course Chica is following me, and we both run back downstairs and I manage to swat the thing and kill it. It's always something, as Gilda Radner used to say! Makes even the little things in life exciting!

Photo of Moi in the Darkroom!

Okay so I said I would post a photo. Finally got around to loading up a bunch of photos for different people including this blog!

Also drove down to Sacramento and bought more chemicals, ink for both printers, and some Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper, as well as 11x14 fiber based. That always takes a good four hours out of my day.

Tomorrow I'm going back into the darkroom! I've got lots more film to develop. I found some really great shots of the Lone Pine in Carmel and also looks like some good ones from Hearst Castle - specifically of the indoor swimming pool. And that's only the beginning.

In the Darkroom!!

What a great day for moi! I've been in the studio and darkroom all day. And now I've got to quit and make some dinner.

Getting everything set up takes a lot of time and patience - working out your own process times and procedures. I'm a visual person (no pun intended) and I need to write my stuff down! I developed four more rolls of film and then got set up on the dry side to do test prints. Figured out my developing time for the contact prints, of which I finished two of those. I could be in that room 24/7. My husband was in the studio here also drawing up a plan all day too. He was happy to see me working in the darkroom. I think he was as excited as much as I was. He had to take some pictures of me coming out of the darkroom and showing him my "results"!

I'll post one later! ; )

Swapping out Photos

After almost two weeks of company and my husband returning from his fishing trip, I'm out in my studio!

Today will be a traveling day as it's time for me to swap out photos from the Blue Moon Gallery with new work. So to make it easy I will be removing two of my new Bodie works from the Kerry Terese Salon and Gallery and replacing them at the Blue Moon and vice versa! That's easy enough.

And then I can get back into the darkroom and develop more film and actually start on some prints! I am so behind.