Graveyard wander

So last week I had a wee poke around Killowen Churchyard.  A place not without significance - my mother and father were married in the Church in 1960 and my great-grandfather on my father's side is buried in the old graveyard out front.  Not that I ever knew that, mind, until I started poking around in the whole Family Tree stuff.  I mean, here's a place I pass several times a week and never knew there was a whole family of McNeills buried there until I spent a couple of days looking through the Church Records a while back.  It was all in old script writing - not the easiest to decipher, I have to say.

So now every time I pass there I have a wee thought or two for my great-grandfather and a wee wonder what his life was like.  He was a stone-mason, born 1840 and died 1912 - but I'll save the details for another day.

Anyway, on that particular day last week I was armed, unusually for me, with a Mamiya 645 Pro TL which had an 80mm f/2.8 attached.  It's a long story but I only had it for a couple of days.  Very nice it was too, I must admit - although a bit on the large&heavy side for me.  It has an electronic shutter and was the last of the 645 series made, a run which started in 1975 and ended in 2006.

Now this one isn't my great-grandfather's headstone, but it caught my eye all the same and I snapped it into the Mamiya at full aperture.  I split-grade printed it this very morning in the darkroom, on Kentmere VC with a dose of Sepia toner added for good measure:

I did 3 prints once I got something half-decent looking - one I left alone, one I toned in warm Selenium and then this one here in Sepia.  I asked the Usual Suspects (Ed: Great film that - old Keyser Söze keeping us guessing right to the end.) for their advice and while Missy liked the Selenium one best the Sepia one seemed to be the most favoured.

Here's the Selenium one just for comparison:

And here's the vanilla one, which I quite like:

If I was to print this again it might be fun to try a cooltone paper - even MG IV if nothing more specialised were available.  It might suit the subject matter more. Perhaps.