Hello, been a while. Not much photography action has happened since we went to Iceland, besides developing film. Travis and I moved from Ohio to Indiana earlier this year, so all of our energy was focused on that, the packing and the moving and the unpacking. But we’re here now, mostly unpacked, and finally ready to get the darkroom back up and running. I think that our new bathroom/darkroom solution will be a lot better than what we were doing at our old house, but there are still a few things I need to get figured out. I’ll probably do a new darkroom post once we get everything sorted.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a wee bit of lumen prints. It’s good to mix up some fixer and make simple prints, even if I’m not ready to do anything else.
Mushrooms are creepy.
My first project for when we are up and running with the darkroom (in the next few days, hopefully), is to try making some contact prints with this bit of awesomeness Travis scored for me at an antique mall:
That’s right – an unopened box of 1940s-ish Agfa Lupex postcard sized contact paper. I love old Agfa, I love contact paper, and I especially love postcard paper. I have no idea how well the prints will turn out. The one example I found online of prints on Agfa Lupex came out pretty low contrast, but with antique paper there is just so much variation in how things were stored there’s no way to know how a specific paper will react until you try it. If nothing else, I may be able to make lumen prints from it.
This was another antique store find. It’s the cheapest 127 camera ever. We love it.
I would love to load it up with some film, but we’ve got a huge backlog of cameras with partial rolls of film shot in them. It’s embarrassing. So that’s also on the agenda – finish shooting the film in all of these random cameras so they can finally be developed, poor things. I have camera guilt. They just keep… looking at me, all sad and half-shot.
Another thing on my agenda to do is become better acquainted with the Nikon D5100. I use it all of the time, but still feel like there are so many functions I don’t use because I either don’t know they’re there, or am not sure what button to press. I just today learned about the different focusing modes on the camera (still subjects versus action, etc). Yep. Seems like something I should know about.
I got out the super dark infrared filter and popped it on the Nikon this afternoon, playing around with digital infrared. It was windy, so everything turned out blurry, but I liked this shot: