Perusal of the June 2008 archives
Composed by Dr. G on Jun 09
Developing
In the field things had been discouraging. We arrive each morning to check our equipment, and several mornings the sight of tripped shutters filled us with a powerful anticipation. Hours have been spent arched over developer waters, swooning with the heady fumes of the darkroom. Murky images developed, revealing only two startled chipmunks, a squirrel, a rabbit, two bats, a martin and a badger; all with an apparent taste for blueberry jam. Though this may have given others a cause for despair, I was heartened. If this foray into the world of photographing the Others is a failure, I am optimistic for an alternate career in photographing wildlife.Then came this morning. Once again we made our way out to the pasture through the early hours of the spring day, which are, in my opinion, the most heartening of all the seasons mornings. The coolness of the passing night wafts up in searching tendrils from the frozen earth, it permeates your woolies and seeps down into your bones. Then the sunlight rises over the hills and pierces the grey, warming the back of your neck and smoothing away the cold from your reddened knuckles. This morning was such a morning. My optimism was increased when the girls ran off before me to yell back that one of the shutters had been tripped. Lucia and Lenore (the Ls) have become quite capable with the photographic equipment now and so removed the negative holder before I had even arrived into the clearing. Sometimes their talents and skills are so great that I forget that they are still little girls but not this morning. As they ran toward me they quarreled over the plate holder, a tug of war resulted in the plate holder flying through the air and knocking with a crack on the trunk of a near by maple. The girls were suddenly quiet heads cast downward.
My darkroom is a makeshift affair a boarded off section of the cellar, with an old pantry table, enameled pans of chemicals and a pane of red glass squeezed over a small basement window. The negative was placed into a tin frame and immersed, like a wick in tallow, in the developer. The problem was, however, that this negative had a sizeable crack in it having suffered a collision with the maple tree so the negative had to be forcibly squeezed into two holders with enough tension to hold the truncated glass, but in doing so my hands, slick with chemicals, slipped and the jagged edge of the glass was pushed deep into my palm. I ignored the slice, but noticed dark crimson blooms erupting in developer, blood dripping off my index finger. I wrapped a rag of muslin around my hand, and continued on with the development. But these are far from ideal darkroom conditions. Moldy spiders, long dead, remained suspended from their webs in their basement catacomb. When I felt a scurry in my hair my natural reaction was to shoo away the offending beastie, but the action resulted in my muslin bandage knocking against the red glass. A shock of daylight lit the room and, sadly, solarized my negative. The offending creature, a harmless moth, fluttered to the tray and swam in circlets through the developer sending ripples against the edge of the pan. I removed the moth, transferred the plates to the fixative, and surveyed the results.
There was something there, despite my bungling, there was something there.
Composed by Dr. G on Jun 09