Darkroom Days

It is only when I sit down to write an official blog post that I run out of words.

Throughout any ordinary day, words continuously race past me and some may even slow down to create a vignette of recollected memory, an image that only begins to put into words something brilliant and profound. I dog-ear the epiphany... and tell myself I'll record it later for posterity. But it's like exposed 35 mm film that sits too long undeveloped in your sock drawer... only to develop blank when you do get to it 4 years late. True story. I can't help but feel a sense of loss for those parts of my consciousness whose light was captured with such clarity, such a sense of composition... only to disappear unto themselves. 

Isn't it poetic how immediate life experiences become such apt symbols of our psychological floundering?  It's been a couple of months now that I started back in the darkroom. Such a sense of homecoming that is hard to describe, that catapults feelings of nostalgia the second that acrid smell of developing chemicals hits my nose. After 4 hours each Thursday evening of shuffling between the enlarger, the trays of developing chemicals, the light box, despite the dull pain in my lower back, or the aching wrist from constantly agitating trays of Dektol, I drive home feeling satisfied... occasionally taking in long whiffs of the lingering fumes of vinegar on the tips of my Rapid Fixer infused fingers. 

I've been experimenting with my negatives in new ways, developing images with 2 sandwiched together at a time. I'd love to say I did it because I am just That Creative. But, aside from it not being a new technique, I mainly did it because I didn't have have a chance to go through shooting all 36 exposure on my 35 mm film. The exposure counter of my Nikon FE shows an arrow stubbornly fixed on the number <14>... and this for over a month now. No new pictures... Well, I do pride myself for being Green! Recycling is the name of the game that I'm playing. There are so many images from my Montevallo days that I have yet to touch, and others that I am reinventing. And I have to say that I'm really happy with the results! I need to find a way to scan my images on a high resolution scanner... Until then, here's an iPhone picture of a painstakingly developed image, which took about 2 hrs of my time.