revjim.net

Okay… Toby's bugging me to get to bed… so I guess I had better listen to him before he…. well… whines some more.

FUCK!

I swear to god this picture of me looked good when it was wet. I know, I know. I should have waited for it to dry. You can see lighter colored lines on the wall next to me thanks to my phenomenal dodging and burning skills (heh… this was the first time I ever tried it… first time I really needed it, actually). Fuck!

And of course… I emptied all the trays and cleaned up after myself real nice BEFORE looking at the dried photographs. Grrrrr.

I wonder if there is a way to touch up a print without having to reprint it? I know… that is the cheap way out… but I'm lazy and I don't care.

The prints of my brother, and the ones of my sister turned out GREAT. The one of the three of us came out as good as it could (better than I expected). The image itself is bad… but it was the best one of the lot. The one picture I thought was decent of just my brother and I ended up not being all that great. Our eyes are half shut. The artsy-fartsy picture of the three of us turned out pretty good too. I had to do a lot of cropping to make it look right.

Note to self: Next time you take portraits and intend on being in ANY of the pictures… bring another photographer along.

Now I am debating whether or not I should drive up to work and scan these in tonight… or wait until morning.

I have always thought about building a photograph repository type website for public usage, but never felt the idea would take off well. I guess I was wrong, as my recent visit to photo.net shows that they have done just that. I don't really like the way their interface works…. but at least they have something. Written in TCL too… ick.

I have submitted two photographs to their site:
Trinity in Perspective
Gutter Girl

Enjoy!

Just finished about three hours in the darkroom. I made four prints of all three of us (myself, my brother and my sister), two prints of me (that required dodging and burning because my eyes are always too dark in pictures) and four prints of my brother (the one good shot I got of him was the one I snapped when he was playing with a pile of leaves and didn't know I was watching him). I also made two prints of a shot of me, thinking it was good, but after I turned the lights on I realized I didn't like it at all.

I may go up to work and scan some of these later this evening.

I am going out to get coffee with Tony.

Back from the movie, and the camera store. I decided to just say FUCK the mall.

Going to a movie with Nicki and Kim. Then I have to run to Arlington Camera, and then *gasp* to the mall.

I cleaned my darkroom out last night. You see, several months ago, I developed a bunch of prints in a hurry, and then closed the door and never looked back. I left the developer in its tray, the fixer in its tray, and even had several print failures soaking in water in a tray of their own. Oddly enough, the water tray was the nastiest. The developer and fixer solutions merely crystallized after the liquid evaporated leaving a caked on gunk in the grooves on the bottom of both trays. This took a little scrubbing, but came out rather painlessly. The water tray had a slimy white/pink/black coating on the bottom of it, as well as covering the tongs that were also sitting in the tray. This took some time to clean.

After cleaning, I made contact sheets of my new negatives. As I was making these I realized I didn't have enough paper to make prints, and so I would have to settle for only the contact sheets. I suck at making contact sheets. They are always a little blurry and I don't have any A4 paper… so the last row of negatives always gets chopped off and I have to reprint just that last row on another piece of paper.

This set of photographs turned out okay, given the circumstances. Several of the photographs were taken by people who do not know photography. This means that I calculated exposure, adjusted the focus, and then attempted to portray the framing of the shot to the person who would be taking the picture. I had to do this because I was the subject of some of the shots. A few of them are a muddy, because the person running the camera moved from the spot I established, and ended up with the sunlight pouring straight into the lens. In addition, a few of them are out of focus, again because the person running the camera moved from where I told them to stand. When I would see her move, I would tell her she needed to refocus… and the shots were too complicated to rely on auto-focus… so she had to do it manually. I cannot fault her really.

All in all, they turned out well. I have to run to the camera shop again today and pick up some more paper. Hopefully I will be able to finish this up tonight. I have about 20-30 8×10 prints to make from 4-6 negatives. I figure I'll need about 3-4 sheets per negative to find correct exposure. This means about 60 sheets of paper all together.

I would also like to make some smaller prints (5×7), but that means I would have to buy a new easel as my current one is of the 1/4″ border variety, and therefore only handles 8×10. I really want one of those adjustable easels…. but these things cost a lot of money.

I guess I should get in the shower and get started on today.