Monday 3 June 2019

Towards Rathlin

Probably the last of the prints from Ballintoy Harbour - this time looking out towards Rathlin Island.  Not very much is sharp in this shot - light was fading fast and I was handholding the 'Blad most likely at f/4.  There was a low-lying mist near Rathlin and everything was very still and serene.  Good for the soul - apart from the fact that there was a dozen or so photographers prancing about all over the place.  But it's a big enough place that we weren't tripping over each other so it worked out well enough.

HP5+ in the Hasselblad, ID-11 developer, Adox MCC paper.
This was another of those prints that I wasn't too sure about.  When it came out of the fix it looked way too light with almost nothing in the sky at all.  But - as we all know, right? - most fibre papers will darken as they dry (the 'dry-down' effect) so in the finished print the detail in the clouds is fine.

I'm hoping to get back in the darkroom soon - it's about a week since I printed and generally speaking I like to print twice a week if at all possible.  Too long a break and I seem to lose that intuitive quality about what will work and what won't.  But Missy is doing her first big national exams (GCSEs) this month and Yours Truly here is Tutor #1.  Not that I'm any good with Chemistry or Biology but I can help out with the Physics and Maths side of things.  That, and the general exam technique which doesn't seem to be taught in schools these days.  It's been a lot of fun, actually, checking out the exam syllabi and poring over past papers to try to predict what might come up.  We had a bit of good fortune with her Physics paper last week, since two of the questions we looked at in the morning of her paper came up.  Doesn't happen often, that, but we'll take it when it does.  Fingers crossed for more good fortune like that this week...
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2 comments:

  1. Roy Karlsvik21 June 2019 at 20:43

    Ah... Rathlin Island, more or less the only little piece of Northern Ireland I've seen with my own eyes. That's not the entire truth of course, but quite close. I really hope to see quite a bit more of it some day, to be honest.
    Your little story of checking past papers for hints of what might come up sort of reminds me of something that happened to me during my final prepares for one of my engineer exams quite a few years back now. The first thing that happened that semester was the lecturer giving us a totally unfamiliar task of reading turbine pressures and a bunch of other values out of a diagram to do the right calculations out of the thing. It was a very fancy one with a completely wild amount of information put into it. No one could read it, and none could distinguish up from down on the thing. Nevertheless he pointed out a few valuable points, gave a couple of hints and made us go home and figure out a few things for the next day. The diagram was never mentioned again... until the day of the examination, of course. Luckily I had learned to understand this lecturers funny ways, and therefore been pulling this thing out from the pile of papers the day before the exam and gone through the two or three main points. Plain luck, of course... or seventh sense, I don't know. Anyway, the exact same thing were to be found in the exam papers the next day, so that was a very easy one for me. Not so for the other poor guys...

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    1. Michael McNeill23 June 2019 at 11:45

      Rathlin's not a bad wee rock in the sea to feast your eyes on, Roy - as you know.

      Ah the games those lecturers play at times - all good fun...I think. Sounds like your sixth, or seventh sense did you well that time. The way the specifications are written for Missy's exams means it's reasonably easy to work out *what* is going to be on the paper...but an entirely different thing is *how* a particular aspect is going to be tested. Sometimes we win, sometimes it's not so clear. Anyway, they're all finished there on Friday so it's time to put them out of the head for the moment - results are out sometime mid August. And then we deal with whatever needs to be done.

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