Mike Wilde's cards are in the mail
After receiving a good seven or eight nice cards I got motivated to get mine together. Last night I printed, this morning I pulled the prints from the drying blotters, and at lunch I made up and addressed the backing cards.
Once I got the kids to bed I revved up the dry mount press, and 'glued' all the components together.
For me this was another 'blast from the past' image. We are coming up on Canada Day weekend in another day or two, so I dug back to see what was the earliest Canada Day images that were easily accesed. I found a few rolls that I shot when I was 18. Looking back on them 23 years later, wow, I am glad I stuck with it and at least somewhat improved, because my shooting technique as seen from what was on those contact sheets was awful. The next year I moved away to go to Uni, and seeing the world beyond my home town seems to have done my photographic eye the world of good. Contact sheets from just a few years later are a good deal easier to view from todays perspective.
The other blast from the past was using up another long outdated paper. Last fall I found a still sealed 25 sheets of 8x10 envelope of Kodabromide single weight finish E grade 3 paper, at my favourite camera store, for the grand price of $2, with no guarantees that it was any good. Lo and behold, it was good, little if any fog other than on the top sheet, and the grade today was about 2.5.
The last blast was using up the last of my old Ademco dry mount tissue. The packaging read ' made in Great Britain by the Adhesive Dry Mount Co. Ltd. 26 Stamford St London, SE1.' It had a batch code of 1-3351, and a packaging code of 4J 1251, so I think it was made all the way back in 1951. Instructions indicated that it should seal at 154-167F, but the shellac in this stuff is so dry by now, that I found that it worked best with still slightly damp prints, and with the press running at 315F to force some steam into the old stuff to breath a last gasp of adhesion out of it.