Thursday, December 20, 2007

172

I was really pumped to get some solid darkroom time today, to progress on my "Grain" project for which I've shot a couple of thousand feet of film but is all sitting waiting to be developed. However, upon studying my chemicals this morning I found that I was missing one part of the colour development, so I decided to substitute the paper bleach/fix for the c41 colour film fix. However, the two tests I ran gave me the same results, the print stock I shoot was underdeveloped and very red, and the colour reversal stock is highly over-developed, nearly black. This is the result from clips of film clothes-pinned together and running through the same chemicals at the same time. Quite disconcerting. So I moved on to testing coffee development. I mixed up a batch (10x the volume from the recipe) and put it in my bucket. My first tests were fine, so I went on to add a roll. However, it turned out very thin (light). A second attempt to do the roll as reversal was also a wash, although I created a minute of luscious brown I don't think I could have made any other way. All told, that was 6 hours and the loss of 2 rolls of film. Oh well, at least I did get into the darkroom, it felt pretty good. I talked with Joe for a while I he just found out that Art 222 will not be offered next term, which means that the darkroom will not be used for any specific courses, and thus I can get a lot more work done without having to kill myself with it over the holidays next week. I have a Bolex signed out so I'll work on some snow footage.

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