Graffiti

Banksy excepted, graffiti has such a negative connotation to it, don't you think?  While a lot of folk around here might not class this particular bit of street art graffiti as such, it is painted on Council-owned property (the kiddies beach & play park in Portstewart).  It appeared around the time The Open golf tournament was held in neighbouring Portrush, so a couple of years ago.  The weather has rendered it slightly less readable than it used to be: 

The Crescent Playpark at Portstewart, February 2021

Taken on the 4x5 Walker TiTAN pinhole camera, with Fomapan 200 loaded.  I was rating it at iso 50, which gave me an exposure of 30 seconds on a rather blustery (and cold!) afternoon last week.  I tray-developed the film sheets in ID-11 1+2 for 11 minutes and they came out looking rather delicious, if I say so myself, with lots of detail in the sky and the foreground.  Printing them on Ilford MG Classic fibre paper was challenging, though.  I burned through a few test strips before I settled down to waste a full sheet of paper.  That set the marker and what you see here was the second full print made.  For the record, after the base exposure for the foreground I burnt in the sky first and then the left hand side, both times using a sheet of paper to mask out the other areas.  Then for the fourth and final pass I did a selective burn-in of the middle of the print, using a sheet of paper with a hole torn in it.  Torn rather than cut as you want the edges to be rough.  It was tough to get the middle part to tone but I knew the detail was there in the negative, it was just a case of giving it enough light without causing the rest of the print to go black.