Printing Money(pit)

Last Thursday night, when I should have been in bed, I finally did something I haven't done for at least 12 years, and COULDN'T do for at least 8. I printed a photograph in my darkroom.

I have had a darkroom in my house since I was a senior in high school. My friend George gave me his Federal enlarger, a custom made timer box he and his dad built (way cool: it turned off the safe light while the enlarger was on, as a precaution against fogging, I guess), and as an added and still treasured bonus, a Yashica 635 TLR, complete with the 35mm adapter kit. That Federal saw me through a few years, and covered up to 120 film. Basic, but it worked well.

When I got into college, I was exposed to large format via the school's 4x5 view cameras. That was so much fun, I ended up buying my Cambo 4x5 view camera. That brought on the need for a bigger enlarger, so I found a used Omega D3, and installed it in my darkroom.

I soon discovered that having my own darkroom was a double edged sword. My professor started grading me to tougher standards than my classmates, because I had unlimited access to a darkroom. Never mind that my schedule as a musician kept me busy enough that I often missed the open lab time at school, so having my own was more necessity than luxury. It's not like I was learning more from him by doing it all myself. Throw in the fact that I liked more contrast than he did, and we have the makings of a classic adversarial relationship. After three semesters of classes with the same guy, I was disillusioned with photography. I gave it one last try by switching from the fine art program to the commercial art program, where I had the best photography class I've ever taken.

The professor was very knowledgeable, and had an easygoing teaching style. He assigned each student different films and papers to buy, and then we all traded with each other, so we got to try a range of products. We learned to use the studio flash system, and played with different processing chemistry. It was everything I ever wanted in a photography class.

The entire time in class, the prof would tell us how when he was in school at Kent State, he would mix his chemicals from scratch, or coat emulsion on different substances, or all kinds of awesome sounding stuff. By the end of that semester I learned the most important lesson of all: I had to transfer to Kent!

That's when I learned that at KSU, Photography is in the Journalism school, not Art. My English grades were not up to snuff for journalism, so I had to bring up my grades before I could get into photography. Well, that didn't work out like I had hoped. My casual attitude, coupled with an incompetent professor, actually earned me an "F" in English Comp. When I asked him what happened, he actually said to me (and I remember it verbatim, because it pissed me off so badly, it ended my college career instantly), "You didn't do what the class required. You wrote your own original essays, instead of quoting from the reading material. The sad thing is, you are the only one in the class that has even a spark of talent for writing, and yet, you got an "F". That's what is wrong with the modern university system."

Here it is 20-some years later, and all I can say is, "Fuck you, Professor."

So, time passes. In the late 90s, I took some pictures of a very pretty singer friend of mine for use on the cover of her demo record that we were working on in my recording studio. I printed some up for her, and we decided my limited talents behind the lens didn't do her justice, so she hired a pro. Alas, nothing ever happened with that demo record, and unless you live in Cleveland, chances are you wouldn't know who she is. Great singer, though!

That was the last time I printed photos in my darkroom. I had only added a darkroom sink and running water a few months before that, and very soon afterward, I was on the road with the Beatle band, and never had time to even mix chemicals, let alone print.

Then my daughter was born. I took time off from the band for that, and it morphed into a year of stay-at-home work for the band, then a year long lay-off, before my substitute remembered he hated the job, and I got called back. During my time off, I re-discovered photography in general, and film in particular. I started processing film again, and of course, the madness of camera purchasing that has inspired these rambling missives, but printing was still a far off dream.

Boxes containing cameras arrived with alacrity, and soon enough I had so much crap piled up in my darkroom, I was lucky to have a clear enough path to the sink for film developing. The enlarger was just sitting there taunting me, buried under lenses with stuck apertures, and a growing collection of cameras that use 126 film. I bought a couple packs of paper from Freestyle, thinking it would nudge me forward, but alas, all I managed was film, then a pass through the scanner, then upload to Flickr. Wet printing was still a dream.

Recently, though, things fell together in my favor. My daughter is old enough now to not need CONSTANT oversight. The band had a couple weekends off, resulting in extended periods at home, so I could apply myself to the task of cleaning and organizing the darkroom. A sizable pile of cameras was handed off to a friend who freelances doing eBay auctions for a cut of the proceeds; one day while our kids were having a play date, he offered to turn some of my extra cameras into money. I took him up on it, and that got me some floor space, and inspiration.

A week of dedicated effort finally paid off. I had all the 126 shooters in a box, where they shall remain until I can devote myself to the problem of re-loading the cartridges. The table with the enlarger was cleared (perhaps the only open, flat surface in the house, although I have been gone for a couple days, so...). Developing trays were washed and ready.

A couple years ago, the band had a gig in New Hampshire. On the drive home, I found a guy on Craigslist that was giving away (!) the last of his darkroom chemicals to whomever showed up wanting them. Much to my stage manager's chagrin, I insisted that we stop by. He lived a mere four blocks from the interstate, after all. From him I got 10 bags of D76, 10 bags of Microdol-X, 4 bags of Dektol, and 6 bags of D11. All old, but powder, after all, and more importantly, free!

So Thursday evening, while waiting for a friend to arrive from California, I set about mixing up the chemicals needed. Alas, the four bags of Dektol from the guy in Boston were all VERY past the due date. The powder was a pronounced brown color, and the addition of water made it even worse. Luckily, I had a more recent bag from the local shop, and that mixed up just fine.

While I waited for the Dektol to cool, I straightened up a bit more, put my daughter to bed, kissed the wife goodnight, and sat down to wait for my buddy to arrive, paging through the last few years of negatives to see which would get the honor of re-opening my darkroom.

He showed up at midnight, as flights from LA tend to do around here, and after getting him a beer, we went into the dark. He was charmingly impressed with the process. He had dabbled in photography in high school, but never in a darkroom. It was like magic to him.

The first thing I did was make a contact sheet of a roll from my Koni-Omega. When I had scanned that roll with my $5 Goodwill scanner, it left a bit to be desired. The contact sheet looked MUCH better. As it showed up on the paper in the Dektol tray, my buddy's eyes bugged out, and he said, "Whoa! Photography!" like he never knew how it actually worked. Kinda fun, actually.

But, this being the first sheet into the bath in 12 years, I HAD to screw SOME thing up. I noticed I had laid the page of negatives down on the paper upside down. Looked good, but reversed.

The second sheet came out great, and I was thrilled with achieving my longtime goal of getting back in the darkroom. Just in time for the band to get busy again!

Being WAY past my bedtime, and with a 9am departure looming, I had to wind things up. But before I did, I wanted to make one print that actually used the enlarger to pass light through a negative. I wanted it to be 35mm, because I just got a good deal on a Nikkor 50 enlarging lens that I wanted to try.

The negative I chose was one that my wife (who has an innate talent behind the lens that dwarfs mine) made of her father at a restaurant on his last visit up north. Now, just before she took this shot, I had snapped a couple of her and my daughter. The window was behind me, light looked good, should be fine, right? Two perfectly exposed snapshots. Story of my life. I handed the camera across the table to my wife. Camera is still on Program mode, so nothing changes. She shoots into the setting sun, and grabs two magnificent shots: one of me, one of her Dad. She makes me nuts....

Anyway, the winning negative was the shot she took of her Dad. The first print revealed a dust speck on his eyebrow, so I did a second pass after blowing off the negative again. There are a couple smaller dust issues, but it printed fine with a 25 second exposure and no contrast filters added.

200 dpi scan of the 8x10 print. Scanned with my $5 HP 4890 from Goodwill.

I can't wait to have time to do more work in the darkroom. After all this time, it might be fun again.

Oops, I did it again!

SonofaBITCH! (One word, accent on the last syllable. Thank you, Peter O'Toole.)

So, it appears that Kodak is on the verge of going tits-up. For real, this time. Bankruptcy looming, and all that. I can't really say it's a surprise. The end of Kodachrome was a strong indicator that the beast was looking for a quiet porch to crawl under to die in peace. I mean, 75 years on the market, and it was STILL not only unsurpassed, but mostly un-equalled in quality. I really loved shooting those last 18 rolls of outdated Kodachrome I got on eBay.

I nearly missed my daughter's third birthday party because I was stupid enough to leave the house without checking the battery in the camera I was using, and spent too much time running around trying to find one. My wife was NOT amused. But the whole point of the last 18 rolls was to capture important family events while I still could. The E6 slides I shot in college are falling apart, but the Kodachrome slides my parents took when I was a kid are in a carousel tray right next to me as I type, and they still look better than any of my new E6 slides, and they are square, so they came out of a cheap instamatic. The first camera I remember my folks having was a 110 Kodak with the tele switch....

My daughter is already hip to my film fetish, and is showing interest even now, at age 4. Christmas morning, she insisted she be allowed to pull the Fuji film out of my Polaroid Colorpack II. She tried mightily, but isn't strong enough yet to get it. Maybe on one of the cameras with actual rollers, sweetie!

I want her to be able to pull out these trays of slides for her kids, in another 40 years, and tell 'em about their wacky Grandpa and his damn fool idealistic crusade to preserve family memories on film. It'll be just my luck that all these slides will end up on Etsy as kitchen curtains.

So what have I done again? I chose the superior technology over the popular. I did it in 1984 when I bought my first Betamax. I had fallen into the VHS camp first, but when I saw how much better Beta was, I got the Betamax ASAP. You all know how that went.

Then came personal computers. Most of you think the battle was waged between Mac or PC. Not me, gang. I went with an Atari!

That's right, my first computer was an Atari Mega 2. It had the GUI, proccessor and ease of use of the Mac, but the hardware was all taken from the PC camp- external drives, printers-you name it, and you could hook it up to the Atari.

I remember the salesman flipped when I told him what I wanted. "A Mega 2??? Nobody will EVER need 2 megabytes of RAM!" Those were the days. And I am still looking for MIDI sequencing software that works as easily and intuitively as the Masterpiece Pro program we had.

There was that one time, when I wanted a surround system for my stereo. Warner Brothers (WEA) got behind the DVD-Audio format, and the Sony empire was pushing SACD. That's fine if you only want to listen to Alice Cooper OR Pink Floyd. But I wanted to listen to both, and when the Toy Matinee album was re-released on DVD-Audio, I couldn't wait anymore. No one was making a single machine that played both yet, so I bought two players (one for each format) and an entirely new receiver that had not only two sets of analog 5.1 inputs, but a phono input as well (try finding one like THAT nowadays!), and completely re-wired my living room. Unfortunately, the Toy Matinee was re-mixed by Pat Leonard after Kevin Gilbert was dead, so the keys are too prominent, and the guitar part in "Jenny Ledge" we were hoping would be isolated in a back speaker so we could figure it out, was instead not even in the new mix at all. For the record, the best surround disc I own is the SACD of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" album. Excellent for laying on the floor with the lights off while watching a midwestern lightning storm through the big windows in my living room.

At that point, I swore I would NEVER get involved in a format war again. I stayed out of the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle. I had learned that one of them would win (probably the lesser of the two), and I refused to get into it. In fact, I STILL don't have either one. Blu-Ray obviously won, but I don't care. The kids at Best Buy keep trying to sell me on one, but I don't care. As I told the pushiest of the salesforce, "I just don't want to. When I am watching porn, I don't want to see the stretchmarks on Tera Patrick's ass that clearly." His eyes bugged out, and he said, "Shit, I never thought of it in that context!"

The 3D TV phenomenon is brewing right now, and that might pull me into the new millenium, but not until the issue of incompatible glasses is sorted out. If I can't take my $100 goggles over to a friend's house to watch something on his competitor's TV, then it's not worth doing. I belong to a stereo photography club, and even the hard-core 3D gang in that club won't buy 3D TVs for the same reasons. One of my buddies has an LG TV that uses glasses that aren't electronically tied to the TV, so they are only $10 a pair, so having enough for a room full of people won't break the bank. I suspect that's the way they'll all go in the end. If they go at all.

So what does any of this have to do with Kodak's woes? Nothing, really, I guess. It's just that I spent the afternoon reading the interwebs about Kodak, and now I'm depressed. Just as I make a deep commitment to getting back into film, Kodak chokes on it. KODAK, fer crissakes! They bloody invented just about everything. Well, everything since they invented film, anyway. They even invented digital photography. I bet they're sorry they did THAT now. I feel like everything was going along great until I got back into it, like I'M the kiss of death.  My growing supply of film has taken over the entire top shelf in my freezer, and along with it, my proccessing options have dwindled. Like an equal power crossfade.

Now, I'm not a complete idiot. I knew before I started this binge that the industry was shrinking, but KODAK? Dang.

The weirdest thing is, I generally like Fuji better these days. Fuji's E6 films look more like Kodachrome than the Kodak E6 stuff I have tried. Their print films pop more than the Kodak film does. I mean, depending on what you're looking for, I guess. I always liked more contrast than my teachers back in school, so the contrast and vivid color could just be pandering to my tastes. I picked up a bunch of Arista Legacy B&W film in bulk (re-branded Neopan, by most accounts), and I really like it, especially the 100 (Acros). I have some of the Arista Premium as well. I loaded that stuff up as well, and it's definitely Tri-X, just like I used all the time before music took me away from my camera. I love the edge marking that gives it away (K'ODAK, hee!) too. Now that the Neopan 400 has been discontinued, I bought 5 rolls on eBay, and I bought what may have been 2 of the last three bulk rolls that Freestyle had as Arista Legacy 400. Gee, I hope it's only ok. I don't want to fall in love with another film I'll never be able to use.

I have been gathering a bunch of outdated film on the bay lately. Trying to limit myself to people who claim it was kept in the freezer, but we'll see how that goes. A few months ago, I noticed that 220 film holders for my Mamiya M645 were a lot less expensive than the 120 holders, so I bought a couple, and so I have been watching auctions looking for deals on 220 film. I even just took delivery of 2 rolls of Plus-X in 220 yesterday. That should be fun. No boxes, so who knows how old they are. Fingers crossed....

So, 2 days ago, I pulled out the 645, and loaded a 220 roll of Portra 160 to try. Imagine my irritation when I discovered that the shutter kept sticking open. Battery light says the battery is cool, and so does my volt meter. Tried another battery anyway, but no luck. It opens fine, but then stays there until I hit the battery test/mirror release button. If I hold the red button down while shooting, the shutter runs at the same speed, regardless of the speed set on the knob. I muddled through the rest of the roll, and dropped it off at the lab today, leaving instructions to go ahead and print anything that is more than a blinding white rectangle.

I also gave them a test roll that I just finished in my Ricoh 126 Flex, a roll of Konica 200 SR that was dated 11/94. I bought a brick of ten rolls on eBay, just to get the cartridges. Because one of the windmills I'm tilting at is that I am going to RE-LOAD 126 cartridges and shoot the mini-arsenal of 126 cameras I have built up. Along with the Ricoh, theres a Kodak Instamatic Reflex, a Minolta Autopak 700, a Yashica, a Kodak 500, and an Olympus that has motor-drive. That makes me giggle, auto film-advance on  a 126 camera. What'll they think of next? Laugh if you must, but these cameras all take very nice pictures, head and shoulders above the Instamatic X-15 I bought in a fit of nostalgia.

This 17-year-old Konica film has a pronounced color-shift toward magenta in the prints, but nothing that can't be corrected during printing. I have made a couple attempts at re-loading the cartridges with some non-perf Portra 160 that I found on eBay. Can'ty figure out a good way to perf it so it works in the cameras yet, but I get about 17 out of the 24 shots on my best attempt, and the film looks fine, so I will keep trying.

So, I did it again. I got into a format war, and picked the losing side. I console myself that I can use adapters to put most of my old lenses on my 50D. And I have a freezer full of film to go through, and a little room on the top shelf to stockpile couple rolls of Tri-X and T-max films. Maybe some sheet film for the 4x5. I suppose I better get enough D76 and fixer before it's yanked out from under me as well.