Waiting

Well I had a marathon darkroom session yesterday.  More lith work, which is slow to begin with and tends to get slower as the developer exhausts - at least that's my take on it.  It doesn't help when you try to re-use the old developer from last week for your first print...after 20mins there was nothing happening, so I gave up and mixed some new Moersch EasyLith.

I was a bit stingy with it...only mixed 1 litre - that's 15ml of both A and B and the rest water.  Plus I added about 75ml of the old developer, 'cos I read somewhere that's what you are supposed to do.  It must have been OK, since the next prints went more or less according to plan.  You have to remember to open up the lens by about 2 stops from your normal exposure and I forgot to do that for one print.  Fortunately I realised my mistake before putting the print in the developer, so was able to just give it some more exposure...I just guessed and it sort of came out OK, but clearly not ideal.

Just a scan, this one, of Mr Road Racing himself - the late, great Joey Dunlop.  A local lad, from Armoy and he won just about everything there is to win on a bike, including an amazing 26 Isle of Man TT victories.  His brother Robert was also a road racer and was killed at the North West 200 in 2008.  Robert's children, William and Michael still race and are on the circuit this week.  Hopefully there will be no accidents this year, but at speeds of up to 200mph on normal roads when an accident does happen it tends to end badly.

I was almost done and dusted, with the prints taking around the 10 minute mark to come good.  I decided one more would be it and dunked the final print in the developer mix, only to see nothing really come up until 20mins had passed.  Eventually something appeared, but I think it's safe to say I'd reached the end-of-life for this particular mix.  Just for the record that would be 8 prints, roughly 9.5x6 in size - that would be a sheet of Fomatone131 9.5x12 paper cut in half, approximately :)

So the prints are dry and are currently lying under a heap of old LPs in an attempt to get them reasonably flat.  Then they'll get scanned and put on this place before some of them are posted to various places.  Worth the wait, hopefully.