Got into the darkroom last night.
One of the first/earliest of my negatives. I've never printed this one before because it was just too thin. I never thought I could get anything out of it. My wife still thinks it's too dark and "why would you want a picture like that?"
But it's the old emotional excuse, it means a lot to me. Sure I have better pictures of my grandfather. Sure I have better pictures of my cabin. But I don't have any other picture of my grandfather taking a nap on the couch in the cabin living room.
The camera was my mom's Ricohflex, printed on MGIV with a blue filter and ND 0.6 to help keep print time reasonable (40 seconds). It was so dark on the easel I thought I might be able to use my infrared viewer to see what I was dodging. Turned out to be useless. (Maybe because the blue image had no red in it at all).
Thought I'd use a one-piece "L-shaped" dodger to brighten the windows a bit, but that lightened the black border making it obvious. So I made a smaller dodger shaped like the taller window and dodged 5 seconds in the middle of that window... then came in the side to the upper-right corner window for 5 seconds. I dodged the general area of my grandfather a few seconds as well.
One thing different about MGIV compared to Galerie, is the sheen of the glossy surface. It's a little more sheeny than Galerie. Not entirely unpleasant but just a bit.
After setting up to dry, the darkroom got converted back to Christmas wrapping. I want to warn everyone about wrapping paper with glitter. Glitter falls off and gets all over everything. There were bright sparkles everywhere around the sink and on the floor. It really freaked me out last night, so I spent about 20 minutes vacuuming everything up that I could see.
Got the mess cleaned up and loaded a couple rolls of 120 TMAX 400 into a tall tank where they are going to sit and acclimate for "a long time" before I develop them.
