I’ve been working on the new Home, Family, and Friends photo gallery. and so I’m spending more time in Affinity Photo, which will be my replacement for Adobe Lightroom. I was hesitant to dive into it without going through the tutorials because it’s UI and workflow is Very different. But I decided to just take the plunge because running Lightroom while I have my computer disconnected from the household network is becoming tiresome.

Why am I doing that? Because I don’t trust Adobe to not reach into my computer and turn off the software I bought a “perpetual” license for back before they went to their Rent Our Software Forever Or We’ll Turn It Off business model. They have already turned off the licensing servers for their stand alone versions and I’m pretty sure that means I can’t reinstall lightroom if I ever need to. Plus I’m also pretty sure they’ll be turning off all the old stand alone versions soon anyway, if they’re not already doing that. I was reading a thread on the AAEC members forum after the kerfuffle over Adobe’s new licensing terms, and how some cartoonists were keeping their copies of Photoshop…their legally licensed copies mind you…on machines they kept carefully isolated from the Internet just to make sure they could keep using the software they bought.

But I need to have my art room computer connected to my other household computers. So I can either turn off the Internet connection at my router, which still leaves me access to the other household computers and my NAS, but which turns off the entire household to the Internet, or I can just unplug the art room Mac’s ethernet cable, which means then I can’t reach my NAS and any of the data files I have on it, and I can’t reach the printers.

So I’m taking the plunge, finally, into the Affinity workflow. What I’m finding is this software is stunningly powerful…much Much better than Lightroom. But you have to get yourself adjusted to the very different user interface. And its document model.

Lightroom, like Aperture while it was still a thing (I loved Aperture’s user interface, but Aperture never really worked for us film photographers. Apple is not the software engineering genius it wants you to think it is), employs delta files that it keeps all your adjustments in. Things like exposure, contrast, dust removal, cropping, resizing, and such. This way it never changes your original image file, unlike a straight up image editor like GIMP. This is important for a photography workflow because, and especially with a digital original, that file IS your negative (in a sense). You want to keep it untouched or you’ve lost your original.

So what you see on your screen in Lightroom is the original image, plus the deltas. When you make a print, or export to a file to put out on the web or social media, Lightroom and Aperture would apply the changes you made in the delta file to the original, then do the export or send the print stream to the printer. When you Save, you are only saving the delta file. Your original image remains untouched.

Affinity does it differently. If you Save instead of Save As, thankfully it first gives you the choice of overwriting your original, or saving to its own proprietary file format. Once you save it to its own file format Save always saves to that, and your original is secure. There is no separate delta file. What there is are a series of “layers” over your original that contain the adjustments you make. Affinity calls these “adjustment layers.” So in a sense the deltas are included in the Affinity file, not as a separate file that’s merged with your original as needed. You can see all the adjustment layers in a layer toolbox similar to the ones in GIMP or Photoshop. If you want to remove an adjustment you remove that adjustment layer. You can also deselect each adjustment layer to see the effect they have on the original.

I am very impressed with Affinity’s handling of my photos. It is a big step up from Lightroom, although granted I haven’t updated my copy of Lightroom since Adobe went to its rent it forever business model instead of just selling you the upgrades. Maybe Lightroom has improved. I don’t care.

Affinity is still maintaining its version 1 which works on my older Mac Pro. Version 2 needs the newer Mac or Windows operating systems and thereby the newer hardware. But it is also not rental software. You buy a license just like in the olden days. I’m almost completely free of Adobe in my art room workflows now. All I need is to write a program to make my web galleries.

So, a wee update on that new photo gallery I’m working on…

I found a roll from 1975 I really need to scan in. It involves our work installing a monster TV antenna on a friend’s house. Back in the day, before cable TV was everywhere, a directional antenna on the roof, mounted on an antenna rotor, got you the best picture, and maybe even good signal from other cities like Baltimore or even maybe possibly Harrisburg. And my classmate-friends were all in with bigger is better.

The project…had an unexpected outcome.

I saw these shots in my archive contact sheets and knew I had to include them in this first new gallery. But there is a problem. The film is Ilford, which I wasn’t used to using over Tri-X. And according to the catalogue I developed it in D76- 1:1 as a one shot. It looks like I over developed. Probably because I just blithely assumed that since the Ilford roll was ASA 400 it developed just like Tri-X.

So these negatives are very dense. The scanner can handle that and give me something I can work with. But lord have mercy it takes a long time to scan. The first set of 12 negatives took sixteen hours to scan.

So I’ll be scanning this roll in for the rest of today too. And I have four more rolls (that should scan normally) with shots on them I want to include that I need to scan. So maybe by the weekend.

But when this roll is done I’ll throw a couple shots from it up here as a teaser. I can think of three or four classmates on here who will remember it well.

It began with my needing to find a place on my website for the shots I took of the wind damage in my neighborhood. I realized that they needed their own gallery in my photo galleries pages, and as it happens I have a gallery specifically there for random home, family and friends photos.

But if you ever clicked on the link to that gallery you got a 404 because while I set aside space for that I never actually created the main page for it. That link has gone nowhere for over a decade now. Sorry.

So I set about creating the main page for that photo gallery. In the process I discovered a change I wanted to push to the four other gallery pages. So I spent some time working on that.

I spent the better part of a day working on creating that Family and Friends gallery’s main page and its banner. The gallery main pages are all basically alike, but there is a banner graphic for each and I need to create one for the Family and Friends gallery.

I don’t use a web page creator. I do all this by hand in your basic HTML…because I can. My blog is WordPress and the actual photo galleries are generated by Lightroom (which I’m still stuck on alas…). Everything else is hand rolled by me in HTML.

I had to dig to find a Photoshop file I’d originally used to create one of the banners, so I could maintain the look of all the others. There’s a bunch of layering in there to get me to the look I want. But the Photoshop file I was looking for wasn’t where I expected it to be so I ended up doing a lengthy search on the art computer data drives and my NAS.

Finally I found it, and put it where it needed to logically be. Then I opened it in GIMP and saved it as a GIMP file because I despise Adobe more than you want to know.

I had to spend some time in GIMP fiddling with the new banner, selecting just the right image files for it, getting it all to look the way I wanted it. While I worked I jumped back and forth between GIMP and FireFox to make sure the new page and it’s links were forming up the way I wanted.

Then came pushing the new pages to the web server. For some reason I haven’t debugged yet, Free File Sync balked at uploading some of the files and I had to upload them manually. So there was that tangent.

If you look you’ll notice a placeholder thumbnail there that doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll have the real thumbnails and links up soon. Hopefully.

So then, because having only one gallery of neighborhood damage shots in there didn’t seem like starting it off right…it’s supposed to be Home, Family, and Friends not Neighborhood Disasters…I set about creating a first proper set of photos for that gallery.

I figured first I’d do a set of my friends from the early days. I figured I might follow that up with a set that’s just from my Woodward shots. So I started going through my archives for those shots, only to discover that some of what I thought I’d scanned in I hadn’t.

I knew I had some really good Deep Creek Lake shots, and Ocean City shots that needed to go in the new gallery.

So I spent a bunch of time looking in my negative archives for shots I knew I had but…did I scan those or not…and if I did, were they loaded into Lightroom (which alas I am still stuck with for now). It took me some time to figure out I still needed to scan some negatives in.

I have a Lot of negatives from back in the day I Still haven’t scanned. And because I run the scanner at max resolution and noise reduction (because why wouldn’t you?) it takes about a business day to scan in a roll of 36 exposure 35mm film.

So the new Home, Family and Friends galleries won’t be up until at least the middle of this week. Not bad for a job I thought I’d just dash off in an afternoon’s work. Stay tuned…

I’m reading a Vanity Fair article about a young photographer for the Daily Express who was assigned in January 1964 to tag along with The Beatles as they went on tour, first in France and then on to their first tour in the US.

These couple paragraphs of the article really took me back. The band is in Paris and the photographer, Harry Benson, has to get his photos back to the paper in London for the paper’s next daily edition. This was Way before digital cameras and the Internet…

That evening they knocked about in the suite again. But my day didn’t end when the Beatle’s day ended. Every night I’d stay up in my hotel bathroom, developing and printing pictures, so the Express could pick one to run in the paper. I’d use gaffer’s tape to seal any openings around the door, wedge towels under the door, and put a bedsheet on the floor to kneel on. In the pitch dark, I’d put the exposed rolls of black-and-white film in little tanks with D-76 developer, usually spilling developer all over the place. I’d hang the rolls of negatives on the shower rack to dry. I ruined more toilets developing my photographs than I can count.

I’d then put my enlarger on the commode. I’d choose the best frames, print them wet, then fix them with fixer in a small tank. When you flipped the light on, you’d see a hellish mess: your hands and bedsheet stained yellow. You used the bathtub to wash the prints and negatives, drying them with a hair dryer. By then it’s 5am. You’d set up a transmitter and attach it to the bedroom phone and send three or four “selects”; it would take about eight minutes to transmit each picture.

I’m assuming the transmitter worked along the same principle as a radio fax machine. Those would have been international dialing costs, plus hotel dialing charges, and all that even more astronomical when they got to the US. But his newspaper would have gladly paid for all of it along with the other travel expenses given how popular The Beatles already were. That was how you did it back in the 1960s. It would have been how you did it all the way up to the 1980s and the first personal computers and modems I think.

I remember developing my photos in the one bathroom in the apartment mom and and I shared. I don’t remember making that much of a mess and I’m guessing it’s because this guy wasn’t familiar with working in a darkroom, but would just hand off his rolls to the newspaper darkroom guys. If you’re in the darkroom you’re not out in the field getting some shots. Also, I think the Brits make a distinction between “toilet” and “commode” but I’m not sure what it is. I remember setting up my enlarger on the toilet seat. When it came time to make prints I had my trays positioned in and around the bathroom sink. I had a plastic tub with a hole I’d drilled into it that I put my prints in to be washed under the bathtub faucet. I’d hang blankets around the bathroom door to light proof it. For printing I had a safelight I’d attached to the wall above the clothes hamper.

I still have some of that equipment down in the darkroom I’ve made out of the basement bathroom in my house today, including that safelight. Much better enlarger though.

His process seems weird. I can see printing wet given his deadlines. But printing negatives “wet” should only be do-able After fixing because the fixing part of the process takes the unexposed silver nitrates off the film. If you look at film after developing but before fixing (use stop bath!!!!!) you can see the negative in there but the rest of it is milky white because that’s the silver nitrates that weren’t developed because they were not exposed to light. Fixer takes that off the film and now you have a negative you can print.

His film tank should have allowed him to turn on the lights after it was loaded and then he can see what he’s doing pouring the chemistry in and out. I’m wondering what sort of camera he used, but it was a roll film camera of some sort, so I don’t understand why he didn’t have a light proof tank with him that he needed to develop his rolls in total darkness and splash developer everywhere (the Nikor tank was patented in 1937). “By the 1960s the Nikor tanks and reels were pretty much the industry standard.” There were tanks and reels back then for 35mm and 120 roll film. He would have still needed either total darkness or a safelight to print. If he’s printing in total darkness I can see him splashing chemistry everywhere. In the article he doesn’t talk any about the equipment he used and I can understand why since the focus was on being there when The Beatles were just becoming huge. But I’ve done film developing since I was a teenage boy and I have questions.

But…obviously he knew what he was doing because he got his shots and got them back to the paper. And he had the tenacity I didn’t have to make it in that incredibly competitive world…especially since it was a Fleet Street paper he worked for. And he got some of the earliest shots of The Beatles as they were on the cusp of becoming huge, embedded with them on their first tour in the US. Weird as his process was he has my respect, and a maybe more than a little envy.

Stop! You’re breaking my heart!

Or perhaps the Phenidone Test.

Finally…Finally…Finally! I just now received the last raw chemical I need to make up a batch of H&W Control developer from the recipe!

I have all the equipment I need to mix it up. Scale, mixing/heating plate, beakers, weighing trays. I’ve done several trial runs with water in the beakers, calibrating the scale and weighing things on it, getting the water up to temperature on the mixing plate. Everything looks good. I have almost everything I need.

Just waiting now for a little courage.

Seriously…I’ve never done anything like this before, this is allegedly a very weird phenidone based developer that extends the dynamic range of document microfilms which is something you’re not supposed to be able to do, and if I get one little part of it wrong I ruin a roll of film, and probably have to start over with ordering new chemicals. I only ordered enough this time to mix up one batch as a “proof of concept”. I have to end up seeing Something on the film when I take it out of the tank. If it’s off a little I can adjust.

If I see nothing on the film I cry. And stress for days about just being a failure in general.

Ultimately, if it all works, then I attempt to develop that old roll of H&W Control film I never processed back in the 70s. It’s been waiting in various refrigerators ever since, so it should still have something on it. I just have no idea anymore what.

The lab beakers and precision scale for my upcoming project to make H&W Control developer arrived the other day. This is good. They should be precise enough I can compare them to the plastic graduated beakers I’ve been using since I was a teenager and see how much off they’ve been all this time, if any. But these are mostly for the project I have going, to make some H&W Control developer after so many decades without.

I’ve been told the raw chemicals have been shipped finally, and should arrive soon. There is one more item on the list I was advised of on the Facebook darkroom page I wrote about previously, which is a magnetic stirrer with a hot plate for keeping the mix temperature good. That’ll help. My arm got really tired with all that stirring the rapid fix ingredients.

Given the uncertainties in getting my workflow developers and fixers these days, being able to mix up my own from the raw ingredients is a good skill to…er…develop. Although mixing my own HC-110 might be beyond my willingness to risk since the raw ingredients for that developer are Holy Shit toxic. But none of this is a one-shot deal. Certainly if the experiment with H&W Control developer works out. I loved that film. To be able to use it again would be heaven.

I took a stroll over to Service Photo just down the street from me to see if anything has changed since Kodak chemistry became available again. But it hasn’t really. I saw some new bottles of Kodafix which is good, but when I went up to the counter to ask about it I was carefully ignored. The stock of film behind the counter was pitiful. The shelves of second hand film cameras now only had second hand digital cameras. I don’t think they care about film photographers anymore.

I remember being overjoyed to see they’d moved from inside the urban core to just a few blocks from my front door. I think they were the last of the good photography stores between here and DC. I can name them all, including the one I worked for briefly, Industrial Photo in Silver Spring. All gone now. Memories. I have to mail order nearly everything now. But at least I can do that.

I put my troubles to the folks on a film photography forum I follow. I figured many of them would have been working with raw chemistry longer than I’ve been working an SLR camera. Got a lot of advice to raise the temperature of my mix water, but one user said I should check my mix again to see if it was still cloudy. He said he usually lets a mix rest overnight before using it.

That was the right answer. I drew a flask out of the brown bottle I keep my film fixer in and it’s crystal clear now. So now I know. Mix and let rest for a bit.

Also, maybe tweak the temperature up a bit regardless of what the instructions say. I thought it was odd they specified 68 degrees. The recipes for H&W Control developer all want pretty hot water (one says 130 degrees, another 140) to start. Lots of advice on that forum to use a bit hotter water.

Also: Kodak Is Making Chemistry Again After All! They’re restarting their process here in the states and most of it is again available on the B&H website. I can buy Kodak HC-110 again! I’m going to ask Service Photo tomorrow if they’ll start stocking it again soon.

And now…

When posting a question to a social media group for their expertise, always expect an answer to a question you didn’t ask.

Many years ago, when I was but a young man, I attended a talk by Ansel Adams at Georgetown University. That Ansel Adams. He gave a wonderful talk about his approach to photography and how he came to develop the zone system, and I ate up every word because he is a grand master of monochrome photography. After he gave his talk he opened it up for questions from the audience. Bunch of good questions from the students, but sure enough someone stands up with a complex question about which developer was better than another. Adams replied that he knew many photographers had their particular holy waters (his words, and the audience laughed) but (and I’m drawing from memory here) the tools are only a means to an end so don’t focus so much on the tools you lose focus on the end.

Remember when I said the other day that there is religion about hardening fixers? When I posted my question to the darkroom group I said that I was looking for a replacement for Kodak Rapid Fix and that Ilford rapid fix didn’t cut it because it wasn’t a hardening fixer and that is why I eventually went with the product from Photographer’s Formulary. I Knew as I typed that I was going to get a bunch of Why Do You Want A Hardening Fixer responses, despite my question not being about the pros and cons of hardening fixers.

Sure enough.

Bonus points for one commenter saying hardening fixers are only for paper and another saying they are certainly not for paper.

Never mind why. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenage boy, I have a workflow that works for me, and I am not changing it. I’m 70 years old now, and every shot I take is a little more experience under my belt doing the thing I do. I love my tools, my cameras, my workflow. It’s my comfort zone. I’m happy there. Whole. But it’s the photograph that matters. Is it what I meant? Yes? No? Keep working it then.

This morning I mixed the chemicals I got from Photographer’s Formulary I wrote about the other day. I was very careful to follow their instructions on mixing To The Letter. Which was good because lawd have mercy when they said to mix in a Well Ventilated Area because some of it would give off fumes they weren’t frikken kidding!

But I had a difficulty. The powdered chemicals they supplied me with did not dissolve nearly as quickly as the instructions said. At one point the instructions called for patience when adding the boric acid because it would take up to five minutes to dissolve. Try more like 20. All if it was like that except for the liquid ingredients. And I kept stirring the entire time. I used only distilled water, and at 68 degrees as instructed.

What I ended up with was a mixture that never got completely clear. Everything finally seemed to have dissolved but it still has a sight cloudy appearance to it.

So I did some tests with a few small strips of 35mm film I sacrificed for the cause. They seemed to clear just fine but there remained a slightly pinkish tint that should not have been there. That worried me until I realized I was still seeing the anti-halation layer which is normally removed by the developer. Since I was just dipping the film strips into the fixer I wasn’t removing that layer.

For comparison I mixed up my last good bottle of Kodafix that I used for paper processing. The Kodafix working solution I mixed up was pure and clear like water. Those strips came out exactly like the strips I did from the rapid fix I mixed up.

What I mixed is a bit cloudy, but it seems to work. But I would like a second opinion from anyone reading this who is more familiar with mixing and working with raw chemicals than I am. What could have happened here? Why was it taking so much longer than the instructions said to dissolve the chemicals? I mean, several orders of magnitude longer. What could have happened, what could I have possibly done, to leave the mixture a bit cloudy. As I said, I used only distilled water, and I mixed in a clean glass Pyrex dish.

I’ve no idea.

This is not making me feel comfortable about mixing up some H&W Control developer from raw chemicals.

I took a fancy to my cameras a few days ago, went to York to visit some favorite places, finished off a roll of film which give me the urge to start working on the backlog of film in my darkroom waiting to be developed. But it had been a long while since I did any of that and I knew my chemicals were past their expiration date. So I went to my local photography store, only to be told (rather coldly by a young staff member), that Kodak was no longer selling chemistry, and they weren’t interested in ordering the raw chemicals I needed to make H&W Control developer.

(Fuck!) So I began scrambling for any unsold stock, only to find that it was already gone. Now I need an alternative source. Well, long story short I think I’ve found one (two) but it was stressful. I have a black & white workflow that’s worked for me since I was a teenage boy and I really Really didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time and waste a lot of film experimenting to find a new one.

My Go-To developer is HC-110. You make a stock solution from a concentrate and then dilute it further to process film. I used the dilution ‘B’ as a one-shot developer. I have a copy of the Kodak Darkroom Dataguide that had the development time calculator wheel on it instead of the table later editions had. Over those pages I’ve stuck a bunch of Post-It notes with data for Fuji Neopan, 35 and 120, and Agfa Rollei Retro film 35 and 120. I stick a Weston thermometer into the developer, then using the dial I align whatever temperature I see on the thermometer with the number for the film I’m processing and the bottom of the dial gives you the time to develop. Then it’s a brief stop bath, then into a solution of Kodak Rapid Fix. Then wash for thirty minutes.

I found a source for an HC-110 substitute at The Film Photography Project, tried it out on a single roll and that came out to my complete satisfaction. So there’s that. But I still needed a good substitute for Rapid Fix. I took a chance and developed a couple rolls of film using the Kodak product I had which was a year past it’s expiration date, and the result was not wonderful. It worked but I had to fix for twice as long to get the film cleared. So no more of that. I needed fresh.

To that end I ordered some Ilford Rapid Fixer, which came oddly without a top cap (the bottle was sealed). So I made plans to use that, but first I did some research because I wanted to be sure it worked enough like the Kodak product I could just keep to my standard workflow. That’s when I saw it wasn’t a hardening fixer.

There is religion about that. A hardening fixer hardens the emulsion has it removes the unused silver nitrates. You really want to use one of these only on film, it does nothing much for paper. But some people think a hardening fixer is bad for film. Long story short: I don’t. I think it’s Good for film. So now I need to find a hardening fixer that works like Kodak Rapid Fix.

I found a source at the Photographer’s Formulary. They also had and were willing to ship to me (unlike B&H) the raw chemistry to make H&W Control developer (more about that some other time). So I ordered their Rapid Fix with Hardener. Days later they still hadn’t shipped (apparently) so I ordered it again from B&H, which resells chemistry from Photographer’s Formulary (just not all the raw chemicals to make H&W Control developer (later…later…). That came yesterday as I type this.

And it’s…interesting. What I was expecting was the usual two-part concentrate and little bottle of hardener. What I got was…this…

By the way…that’s my basement chest freezer, or as I say when that part of the basement is my darkroom, the table where I put my paper developing trays. Next to it is the dryer which just happens perfectly to be the same height as the freezer, and between them that’s my workspace for doing silver paper enlargements. The enlarger is in the shower stall in the bathroom next to the freezer. When you grew up in a series of small garden apartments you learn how to make every space server multiple purposes. I don’t have enough space in my little Baltimore rowhouse for a dedicated paper darkroom, but I can make that corner of the back basement work as one.

So what I got from Photographer’s Formulary isn’t a hardening rapid fixer, but the raw ingredients for making hardening rapid fixer. All packaged in precisely the right amounts…

…to mix up some hardening rapid fixer if you follow the included directions. I’ve no idea why it comes like this instead of packaged as ready made concentrate, other than maybe with them it’s The Way. But this is good, it gives me some practice for when I get the raw chemistry to make some H&W Control developer.

The end result is you get concentrate and hardener which you then mix together to make a (nearly, they measure in metric) gallon of working solution. I’m going to mix it all up today. I’m told when I add the acetic acid fumes will result, so I’ll mix it up in the kitchen where I can open some windows. Progress report later…

I’ve said elsewhere here that I couldn’t make it professionally in the arts because I never had the kind of focus it take. Case in point: just a few days ago I was all about my art gallery, and now it’s pretty much back to the photography.

I have two routes I use for my morning walks, one of which is to zig-zag through the new “luxury” rowhouse development nearby, where the container factory used to be. That development has been a muse ever since they started building it. Today on my morning coffee walk, while going through one of the narrow alleyways between the rows, I saw the sort of slightly cloudy, sun streaked sky overhead I love to work with, and just then it was making that narrow alley look really interesting to my photographic eye.

I had to have that shot. But at that moment all I had was the iPhone. Olay…it can can do a good job with my art photography, I have lots of examples. So I snapped off an iPhone shot just to get it. Then I hightailed it back home and got the Petri out.

I see now I haven’t written about this here, but probably on my Facebook page and I was neglecting this blog. But some time ago I found a Petri FT for sale on one of the used camera sites, that looked to be in very good condition. So I bought it for its nostalgia value to me. The Petri was my first SLR camera, simple and affordable to teenage me, and it opened a new world to me artistically. Now I could precisely compose to the frame in the viewfinder, because now I’m looking through the same lens that will take the photo. It was what you see is what you get, and I could be as specific about composing a shot as I wanted to be. Plus, you could change lenses from wide angle to telephoto, and no matter what lens I had on it I was still seeing exactly when the film saw when the shutter opened. You just don’t get that with any other sort of camera.

When I first got the second hand Petri I ordered I took it to Ocean City New Jersey for an ultimate nostalgia trip. OC became one of my photographic muses back when I was a teenage boy, and it still is. Many of what I consider my best shots from that period were taken with the Petri. Back then I could not afford its native 28mm or 135mm lenses, so those were third party compatibles from Soligor and Vivitar. Now I can, and that is what I shoot with on that camera.

Last summer I took the Petri with me because, perhaps irrationally, I wanted that example of my first SLR camera to see and photograph the land of my birth. I bought it back home to Baltimore still loaded with some Tri-X Pan I’d taken to California with only a couple shots on it. So I had the roll to finish. It still had the 28mm Petri lens on it. I put a red filter on that and gave the camera a fresh battery. Fortune smiled on me and the sky was still pretty interesting when I got back to the rowhouse development and that narrow alleyway, and I finished the roll pretty quickly.

That makes 7 rolls of Tri-X I have waiting for me in the darkroom. I have another partial roll of Tri-X in the Canon F1N that also came back from California. I finish that and it’s an even eight which works out for the four reel tank I have. Still have three rolls of 120 NeoPan 100, three or four of 35mm NeoPan 100 out of the Leica, and five rolls of Agfa Copex to develop when I can mix up some H&W Control developer.

Obviously my inner compass has swung back to the cameras. So it goes…

Since Kodak has gone out of the film developer chemistry business now…at least to the degree they sell it to film photographers as opposed to commercial processors…I’ve had to scramble for a source of a good HC-110 substitute. I found it at The Film Photography Project. They sell an FPP-110 developer that appears to be a functional clone of the new now discontinued Kodak product, that is, not the old HC-110 concentrate but the new version that had a limited lifespan. Fine…I worked with the Kodak product once and it behaved like the old concentrate did. So I was hoping this product from the Film Photography Project did the same.

I have tanks that hold 1, 2 and 4 reels of 35mm film. I loaded a single reel of Tri-X from my California trip as a test, and kept my fingers crossed that I wasn’t sacrificing a roll of good Leica shots just to prove the thing I got in the mail didn’t actually work like HC-110. But it was a complete success. So now I can finish off all the rolls I took in California.

Except for the Agfa Copex Rapid, which I intend to develop using the old H&W Control developer recipe. I ordered the raw chemicals for that from The Photographer’s Formulary. B&H didn’t stock most of what I needed and wouldn’t ship half of them anyway. Photographer’s Formulary ships but you had to specify UPS Ground shipping for two of the chemicals, since they’re declared to be hazardous. Most likely won’t get them here until sometime in mid January.

Still need a scale good to .01 grams.

There’s probably some sort of enlightenment in that fact…

I should have posted this here earlier. It’s sunset in Oceano California, looking off my brother’s backyard deck toward the Pacific ocean, the evening that hurricane Hillary came inland. I was expecting a more impressive than usual sunset over the Pacific that evening and I wasn’t disappointed. It was a Frederic Church level sunset.

I took this with the Canon 6D and 24mm f1.4 lens. Coulda used a 17 or better but the only one of those I have is an FD lens for my film cameras. So after this I priced getting one for the 6D but I would use it so infrequently that spending the money just doesn’t make sense at this stage in my life, and being on retirement income.

This is looking east toward the central valley where Hillary tracked, from my brother’s front porch…

Bakersfield is maybe 100 miles as the crow flies past those mountains in the distance. Barstow, a place I drive through often on my way here and back to Maryland, took a direct hit. Here in Oceano we got a little rain and a little wind and nothing more. Everything on the coast north of Vandenberg was pretty much untouched. But the skies were lovely.

This happened in Orlando the other day.

It’s just a couple weeks to Gay Days in WDW and this is one reason why I’m going there with my cameras. Mostly I just want to enjoy the parks, and being able, finally, to go whenever I want now that I’m retired. I think I want a Disney weekend…okay, let’s just go…no need anymore to request vacation time… It’s been something I was looking forward to. The park reservation system and the fact that it’s difficult for single diners to make dining reservations at my favorite places made me question if I was ever going back again. But I think I’ve worked through all that now. I have my annual pass again and selling my DVC points gets me back to making stays in the basic and mid tier park resorts where I can make reservations on the fly whenever I want, which is nearly impossible at a DVC resort. So I’m back in my comfort zone there.

But Gay Days this year is a special case given all the hate mongering going on down in Florida. So to have some Mouseketeer fun with all the other red shirts in the parks isn’t just a good time this year, it’s an act of defiance. Yes, we are Disney people too. And I want to show my support for Disney since they’re taken a lot of static for supporting us. But also, I want to document what is happening down there, in my own way, with my own eyes.

(As a side note, I’m working on getting another photo gallery up here of the stuff I took during the Love In Action and the Love Won Out protests.)

Security is something you almost never even see at WDW, except at the park entrances where screenings and bag checks take place. Once inside the park you might think it isn’t even there at all. But I’ve seen it appear…suddenly out of nowhere…once.

It was in front of La Cava del Tequila inside the Mexico pavilion at EPCOT World Showcase. Someone, probably having had a little too much to drink, got upset at the wait to get in (it’s a pretty small bar with only a few tables), and started causing a loud angry scene, and so I was told later got physical with another guest. He was instantly surrounded and spirited offsite.

And it’s easy for their security to come out of nowhere because there are usually dozens of hidden entrance/exits for the cast members to come and go so they can go about their work. Walt Disney wanted all the mechanics of making the parks work kept out of sight so as not to spoil the illusions he was creating. Magic Kingdom is built on top of a network of tunnels, they call them utilidors. And everywhere in the parks are scattered little out of the way doors and passages marked “Cast Members Only”. And the really interesting part of it is nearly none of them are hidden in a way you might expect. Instead, the scenery is such that your eyes are always directed away from where they are.

And according to a certain someone I used to know who worked there, cameras are everywhere.

So I’m hoping that first weekend in June their security is on their top game. I want everyone to have a good time. I will be very satisfied if the only photos I get are of happy Gay Days Mouseketeers. Because that is a message people still need to see as a counterpoint to all the lies that are surely coming before, during and after the event.

As you can see there, outside the parks it’s probably going to be brutal. I may try to get a few shots of it, but I will have to be very Very careful.

Cute young guy trying to take a picture of himself in the kitchen mirror with his first 35mm SLR…

I was going through my archives looking for more shots around Congressional Plaza for the next episode of A Coming Out Story and I came across this and zoomed in and I thought…wow…did I really look like Finn Wolfhard back then??

This would be sometime in 1971. I’m either 16 or 17. I’ve got the Petri on a tripod in the dining room pointed at the large mirror over the kitchen sink. I’m guessing I did it that way because the light in the dining/kitchen was better than in my bedroom. At this point I’m still just finding my way around 35mm film photography. I may have just bought the Petri.

I dug up the roll and I can tell from the way I sectioned off the negatives I hadn’t even begun my catalogue system yet. The catalogue entry says “Date Unknown”, that it’s tri-x pan and that I’d developed the roll in D-76. “Date Unknown” is what I put on the stuff I’d developed and stuck into #9 letter envelopes before I got serious enough to safely store and work out a catalogue system for them. They’re not all in great shape.

I’m trying really hard to get the pencils and inks done, finally, for ACOS episode 36 done, and it’s really driving home how necessary it is to have reference photos. I took lots of photos of the apartments I lived in back then, but precious few of the area around them and so much has changed over the years I can’t just go visit and take a few reference shots.

Right now I’m really regretting I didn’t get some shots of the shortcuts I used to take to walk across the railroad tracks to get to the Giant or to Congressional and the Radio Shack before they started building Metro. Nothing there is like it was. There was an old wooden bridge over the tracks I could walk across to get to the Giant from Wilkins that they took down years ago. I discovered it was part of an old abandoned roadway that connected Rockville Pike (Montgomery Avenue back then) to the old school and then to Parklawn Cemetery. You could still see fragments of it in the woods and near the Pike back when I was a teenage boy. It’s all gone now. The entire area where I walked across the tracks to Congressional is now the Twinbrook Metro station.

Nothing is like it was. I can’t just go down there and take some shots of the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood, except for the apartments anyway, is not there anymore. Somehow I need to recreate it. Or at least a good enough representation that I can be satisfied with it.

Nothing is like it was. I’m not like I was. Just look at that photo! Wish I’d known how cute I was back then, I might have flirted with a little more confidence. Of course back in 1971 that could have got me killed.