S

Well if Ian Fleming can give us M and Q, I can give you S, who came to Missy's 18th birthday party last week.  Others came too and you might catch a glimpse of them here too, in the days to come.  

S, via the Blad, HP5+ printed on Foma 313 RC paper.

The Epcot Centre thing in the background (which I'm sure y'all noticed there - right?) is a blow-up bouncy thing with music inside, which we hired for the night. It wasn't a success, as it was full of water and therefore unusable.  The folks who took our hard-eared ££ decided they aren't going to refund us, which is not very nice, so we're 'investigating options'.  I just don't like the fact they simply took our money in exchange for a service which they did not provide and then shrug and say, 'Tough'.  It doesn't sit well with me.  We'll see how that pans out.

But back to more important things.  This was the first print of a new paper for me, Foma 313, which is a cheap (ish) resin-coated paper.  I'm getting stingy in my old age and I've decided to pull back on using fibre paper for anything but masterpieces.  If I like the way it looks on RC paper then perhaps I'll print it on fibre, for the wall.  Again, we'll see how that pans out.  

This print is too harsh and contrasty for my liking.  I know the 'in' thing is to have punchy prints, with blacks as black can be and highlights paper-white but this print could have done with at least a half-grade less contrast, and maybe more.  Next time I'm printing I'll dial it back a bit and see what gives.  And another thing...the last while I've been printing on 7"x9.5" paper but this is 8"x10".  Not a lot in it, you would think, but by 'eck it is noticeable, I tell you.  Funny when I was printing 9.5"x12" and 11"x14" I thought 8"x10" was tiny.  Today it seemed big.  It's all relative, I guess.

Obviously I dragged myself into the darkroom to do this. We've had 3 solid days of 70+ temperatures and don’t laugh but it's all a bit too much for this Northern Irishman, truth be told.  Today was humid and horrible - weather my mother would call 'close'.  That's close as in 'not far', not close as in 'not open'.  I did potter about outside late morning but I gave up and retreated to the relative cool of the darkroom all afternoon.  The chemicals in their glass storage bottles were bang on 20 degrees, which was nice - although it took a while for the cold water to run cold enough to get down to that.  The cold feed to the darkroom comes through the loft, you see, which is like an oven at the minute, so the water lying in the pipes was coming out at about 25 degrees.  Weird.  I don't like it.  It feels...unnatural.