Dry Spell Ahead

My personal circumstances are about to change drastically (I'd hinted at it in a past post). Now, for the first time in 27 years I won't be having a darkroom. I don't know for how long. As this blog is intrinsically linked to my being involved in printing, this post will presumably be my last for some time. But like these snails, I'll be waiting for the first morning dew for another rejuvenation*.

If you're reading this, I reckon you've been here before. I hope you found a bit of yourself in here, a common ground which bonds us all together.

So, good luck and take care until the next time!

* I can only guess that that's what they do :)

Vivian and Other Strangers

Sometimes I think about Vivian Maier. Not her posthumously discovered photographic archive, but how she had kept it all to herself throughout her whole life. Decades of serious photography and seemingly no urge to show it to anyone! You might remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Self-esteem is right up there in the pyramid. We tend to want the pat on the back. There is a reason for the like button on social media after all. Maybe Vivian thought about her photography in different ways; ways that were completely detached from what we would call "achievement"; the simple love of a picture as a memory for example. Or maybe other forces were at play; maybe she was discouraged by a male dominated milieu. Being a nanny, was there anybody who would've taken her work seriously? It's also a possibility that she just didn't feel like pushing her own work. Without the pushing and promoting nothing tends to happen. The whole thing is a mystery I wish Vivian didn't take to her grave.

∼

I usually don't stop a person on the street to take their picture, preferring to photograph in the confines of what's available without my interference. But here I was, on the ferry in Istanbul. It was a cold spring day. No matter how cold or wet though, I tend to travel on the upper deck, in open air. The ship was approaching the pier, and the passengers began to make a move, when I saw this young man with his dog tucked into his coat. I didn't think twice, hurried over and asked permission for a photo, which he kindly accepted. "Please, don't bugger this up!" whizzed through my head as I quickly focused the Rollei T (loaded with HP5) and exposed two frames. Thank you, dear stranger!

∼

I've been using Ilford's cheaper Kentmere range more and more and find both the 100 and 400 speed versions are perfectly fine films. Here are two prints from my last roll of Kentmere 400. It was developed in home-brewed D76 stock solution, together with another roll of the same film. You know what?...if someone had told me these prints were from 100 speed film, I wouldn't have doubted them one moment; the grain is that tight.

The first is a picture I made whilst having a quick and lonely dinner in a local Kadikoy* restaurant. I'd been observing the scene, the comings and goings for a while, then when I thought all looked right, I raised my Leica with 35mm Summicron, focused, waited for eye contact, and exposed one frame. As I lowered the camera the chef ordered the waiter to add the photo to my bill :)

* A district on the Asian side of Istanbul.

After dinner I strolled around in the streets. I've always liked the night-time look of some of the stand-alone cafes by the pier in Kadikoy. They can have a Hopperian air with the neons and the lonely souls. Here, I didn't want to get too close, as I wanted to include the enveloping darkness of the night in the picture. The same camera, same lens, same film, and the same suspense for the "right" moment. 1/30th (or maybe 1/60th) at f2. Man, the Summicron never ceases to amaze me.

Many years ago, I showed my mom some of my pictures. "Why do you take pictures of people you don't know?" she asked. Her question still makes me chuckle today, although I have often asked the same question to myself.

~

Finally, let me show you some prints and the Kentmere negs. The prints are on 24x30cm Ilford Classic and slightly selenium toned. It's a bit difficult for me to get even lighting on my viewing board (oh the irony!), so no perfect reproductions here (although I've fiddled around with the file quite a bit to get a decent look), but they should give an idea. They look much better to the naked eye ;-)

BromoFog

I'm glad I didn't throw out the packet of paper when I discovered it was heavily fogged. It was 10 sheets of 30x40cm Ilford MG WT semi-matt, a lovely paper, but apparently this packet had sat far too long. Mulling over whether I should bin it, I eventually thought why not print on it with heavy overexposure and then bleach it back? The bleach should remove the fog, and with it also the overexposure, leaving me with a normal print. At least that was my hope and I'm glad to say I wasn't too far off. Of course, snatching the print from the bleach at just the right moment (like in lith printing) would be critical. As would be the "right" dilution of the bleach. I used the bleach that came with Tetenal's sepia toner kit. If, like me, you prefer a fairly dilute bleach, then what comes with the kit is way more than what's needed for sepia toning.

So I went mad with those ten sheets. Cutting them up, using various negatives etc. Many were destined for the bin, but some looked good. I re-fixed the good ones and even put them through selenium toner just for the heck of it. I had gone this far, I might as well go all the way to the end. Interestingly, all prints have a very strong yellow tint, including the border.

This photo of the volcano Bromo on the island of Java is one of the better prints, if not the best print I was able to make from that fogged paper. The picture is from a month long trip to Indonesia in 2019. Trying not to loose my balance on the thin ridge of volcanic dust (tumble down the wrong direction and you're in serious trouble), I squeezed off several frames, trying to get a good-looking plume within the black abyss. I used a Leica M6 with a Zeiss 28/2.8 lens. The film was FP4+.

By the way, this is a straight colour scan of the print and on my monitor it looks exactly like the print itself. Well done CanoScan 9000 Mark something!

And here is a video of the environs at the same spot. Man, what a stunningly wild and beautiful landscape!

And it's as short as that, fellow photo-nuts. Now we can all go back to watching camera reviews :-P

I used to think of writing a mildly sarcastic rant about youtube camera/lens "reviews". Then I re-discovered Phil Rogers's hilarious blog post about said topic here. That settled it for me; I couldn't have expressed myself nearly as well as Phil. He wrote that in 2015. Blimey, was it so bad even back then?

On the other hand, buried next to all the atrociousness, there is so much wonderful stuff on youtube. Once in a while AI gets smart and recommends me something that I probably couldn't have found myself. For example, take this video about Dutch photographer Krass Clement. A thoughtful and articulate man, who has deeply thought about photography...and my god, his photographs!

Two Trees

Did you know that time does not exist on a photon? Remember time dilation? As you speed up, your clock ticks slower and slower, up to the speed of light. And on a photon, which travels at the speed of light, the clock stops. Weird, ha? 

So, can we say that without time, a photon has no “personal” history? That's what I infer from reading up on it.

~

For over two decades my parents have been spending the hot summers in a small flat on the southern coast of Turkey. The view from the balcony is spectacular, especially with a lovely pair of eucalyptus trees on the shore. Whenever I visit them, I photograph these trees.

Left is east and right is west. Hence, the above photo was made close to sunset.

Often you see people enjoying a picnic in their shadow. And the sea provides an ever-changing backdrop, from calm blue to jagged lines of high white foam.

The above two photos are from several years ago. 

Then in the summer of 2022, upon arrival, I looked down from the balcony and was hit by a nasty surprise: one of the trees had completely dried up. They had endured for decades, now this. 

We had no idea what had happened. Incidentally, there was a newspaper article during that time about a much loved but dried up tree in a nearby city. Some weirdos had drilled holes into the trunk of that tree and filled them with acid! At least that was the verdict of a botanist. Well, I got suspicious. Maybe the same sick people had been playing their foul games here as well. I inspected the trunk of the tree carefully but couldn't see anything extraordinary. Anyway, I got in touch with the mayor's office and they said they would look into it. Haven't heard a word from them since.

I was back at my parents' flat two months ago and was relieved that the tree was at least still standing. It was still providing shade for those trying to get out of the sun. But I'm worried about these trees. Their future seems a bit uncertain. I dread the day when I'm going to look down and find that they are gone.

~

At this point you might be thinking "bloody colour photies?". Well, I sometimes have colour neg film in a second camera body. It's an occasional side hobby, which I rather enjoy. I've even done my own C41 developing. More about that in another post maybe. 

My main material is still B&W film though (and more and more digital these days😳). This is with a Rolleiflex and Tmax100 film. 

Printed on a Focomat 2c through a 100mm Focotar on Ilford Classic FB, the quality of the print is all I could wish for.

And this long exposure is with a Nikon F2 and the 55mm/f2.8 Micro-Nikkor on FP4+, during a moonrise. By the way, the white spot in the lower centre is a warning sign that shows where a turtle (Caretta Caretta) has laid eggs. 

~

Consider this: photons leave the sun, hit and reflect off the moon, the sand, the sea, those two trees, and come through my lens and land on my film, reduce silver halide crystals to metallic silver and render a picture. From their perspective, they are emitted and absorbed at the same instant. With a non-ticking clock, which can hardly be called a clock, none of those photons could possibly tell the story of their journey. Yet, they enable us to tell our stories with photo(n)graphs!

The Ship of Theseus

Is there a way to start a blog post with Greek mythology and not sound awfully pretentious? I don't know, but I love the question at the end of the story. You most probably know it anyway, so I'll make it very brief. After slaying the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth, Theseus escapes to Delos by ship, some 300 odd kilometers to the north. He arrives as a hero, because he's stopped the sacrificing of Athenian youth to King Minos of Crete. To commemorate Theseus's feat, the Athenians start an annual pilgrimage to Delos with his very ship. Over the years, wear and tear on the ship make maintenance work inevitable. Rotten planks have to be replaced by new ones. Observing this, there comes a time when Greek philosophers ask an interesting question: once every part of the ship has been replaced, is it still "the ship of Theseus"?

The never-ending rebuilding of Istanbul brings to my mind Theseus's ship. As in "is it still my Istanbul?". But thinking this over now, maybe the proper (Greek) analogy would be "you can't swim in the same river twice". Anyhow, during the pandemic this building was on my walking route and I loved the single window in the facade. Did the owner of that flat just say "The hell with my neighbours and regulations. I'm gonna knock down the wall here and open a window!"? A couple of months after I made the first photo a gaping void replaced the window, signaling what was going to come next. Shortly after, as expected, the whole thing went down. Now a new building is there. Its shape is remarkably similar to its predecessor's. So far, it's a white facade, sans window. That might come later!

∼

All three of these photos were made with a Bronica RF645 and the 65mm/f4 lens. They are printed on 24x30cm Ilford Classic FB paper.

The first two frames are on Tmax100 film and were developed in Tmax (1+9) at 24 degrees Celsius. The last frame is from a few weeks ago and is on the new Kentmere 100, which I developed in home-mixed D76. This is my first ever roll of Kentmere 100 and it looks all right. I probably should reduce the development time a bit though; the negs look a bit contrasty.

The Game

I've long thought of writing about the zines I and four other photographers published over the course of 5-6 years, but wasn't quite sure where and how to start, because there are many aspects to it. I didn't want to force it, so I let it linger. And now, whilst on holiday, sitting in a strong breeze, from a fairly high vantage point watching the Mediterranean waves crash onto the shore, the content of this post started to form in my mind and I pulled out the laptop. Here it goes...

It is called "Gözaltı", which literally translates to "under-the-eye". It also means "being under surveillance" and "being in custody"; plenty of subtext there. Self-publishing the zine had quite a few pain points, one of them being coughing up the 100 Euros per photographer. 500 Euros, that was roughly the cost of 2000 zines, each 16x24cm in size, with 32 pages. 100 Euros per photographer, every 6 months, for a zine we give away for free, without expecting anything in return. It doesn't sound too much, but it was a problem that came up in our discussions quite often. Why throw good money out of the window? We talked about trying to find a sponsor and what not, but eventually continued to cover all costs from our own pockets.

Anyway, the moment we were done with the edit and design of our fifth issue and had to collect the money, one of our photographers decided he'd had enough and pulled out. Obviously, you can't blame anyone on money problems; everybody has their own circumstances after all. So, with four remaining in the group, we had the challenge of completely redesigning the issue, and the question of whether we would continue as four people or whether we should look for another photographer. In the end, an excellent photographer whose style we thought would enrich the zine, and who, as a person, would also be a good fit to the group, accepted to join. And indeed, with her contribution of pictures and her help in the edit, I think issue 5 turned out really well.

I should very briefly summarize the concept of the zine. We aimed to publish an issue every 6 months. Beforehand, we decided on a theme, usually a simple word. For example, the theme for issue 5 was "Game". Then we have about 4 months to produce photos that fit the theme. In the last 2 months we try to finalize the edit, the sequencing, the interior design, the cover design and the printing. Once printed, the cycle begins again. And in the meantime, we also deal with distribution of the printed zine, another can of worms.

The editing & sequencing was always the highlight for me. Because here we would all gather in a suitable space, with all pictures laser printed in small format which would be easy to pin up on a board, and we would all talk about the photographs. It was extremely enriching to hear everyone's opinion on each picture and why this and that sequence would or would not work (which could be an entire new post). This was our final edit, but there were many other candidates prior to this.

A social media presence, especially on Instagram, is also a must for visibility. So, after publication, we prepared all sorts of "content".

With the camera it's a bit goofy and I slightly cringe when I see it now. But I did take the photo with that camera and lens. I was on a conference trip to Barcelona and only took the plain-prism F2 with an old pre-AI 35mm/f2.8 Nikkor with me. You can also see the front cover and get an idea about the size of the zine.

This is another one of my pics. It still fits the theme, but has a lot of sadness in it as well. We used it as the closing photo. The first and last photo, and the two-page spreads always had somewhat more importance and I could often sense some hard-supressed rivalry for those spots :)

Here are a few short notes about the above photos:

1. A spontaneous scene in Istanbul. I had a Pentax 645Nii with its standard 75mm/f2.8 lens with me. This camera is a workhorse but somehow I can't fully bond with it. I could say it's a close friendship but not a love affair. I'm not exactly sure why, but the way it extends towards the front, especially with anything but the 75mm, must have something to do with it. The film was Tmax400.

2. A playground in Adana in southern Turkey. Made with a Leica M6 and 35mm/f2 ASPH Summicron. My standard companion for 20+ years. The film was Ilford FP4.

3. Barcelona, as I already mentioned. The film was Tmax400.

4. A zoo. The camera was a Nikon F4 (which I hate) and the 45mm/f2.8 pancake (which I love). The film was Ilford Delta 100. The fine detail on that 30x40cm print I find quite remarkable.

Quite a motley of cameras...that can't be a good sign.

I had two more photos in that issue which I've not included in this post.

A Book of Prints

The period between 2016 and 2021, when with four friends we published a periodic zine, was amazing. We managed to print a total of eight issues, each with a specific theme. The recent economic crisis killed it off, but anyhow, it was a hugely rewarding experience. Towards the end of last year nostalgia started to creep in. So, I began pondering about handcrafting a one-off book that contained my photographs in the zines. 

Weighing various options and my own capabilities, also trying out a few different ideas, I decided on spiral binding proper RC prints; something I'd never done before. To keep the size reasonable and manageable I also decided to only include the 26 photos from the first four issues. If it looked good, I could produce Vol2 sometime later. I was in no hurry and began printing the photos over several months; one or two at a time during every darkroom session. This is the end-product:

I trimmed each 24x30cm Ilford RC pearl sheet down to 24x25cm for an almost square format. The extra centimeter was reserved for the spiral holes. The print size and location on each sheet was another thing that had to be gauged. The book has four chapters separated with a sheet of blue card, each chapter containing my pictures from that issue. I also printed out and glued the zine covers onto each separator card.

I think it turned out quite OK. Very spartan. Very simple. Too spartan? Too simple? I wish I had the abilities and imagination of a Peter Beard...but, oh well, I am what I am, and it's still better than nothing.

Mucilage

The "Spiderweb"

In late spring 2021, millions living around the Sea of Marmara woke up to an environmental disaster. Huge swathes of the sea surface were covered in sea-snot, aka mucilage. Turns out it had been in the making for decades and Mother Nature finally had enough. Apparently, She'd been telling us that She didn't feel well in her own language for a long time, but some of those who should've been listening and acting were clearly not paying attention.

When phosphorus and nitrogen levels rise in the sea, combined with warmer and relatively stagnant water, a reaction is triggered in phytoplanktons which begin secreting mucilage (for more detail: Eutrophication).  Why do phosphorus and nitrogen levels rise? Because of human activity, plus mismanagement. It seems there is a limit to how much untreated waste water you can dump into the sea!

So, one June morning, the shores of Istanbul, which can be breathtakingly beautiful before sunrise, looked like this:

 

The two B&W pictures here are part of the emotional fallout of this event in my psyche. I made them because I found the graphical resemblance to "mucilage" very striking, and because I felt that they mirrored the miserable condition we are in. They were made in the same summer of 2021. Both are found objects and there is absolutely no interference or rearrangement on my part.

The "Angelfish"

~

I made both pictures with a Rolleiflex T (plus a Rolleinar 1 in the "Angelfish") and Kodak Tmax100 film. The prints are on 24 x 30 cm Ilford Classic FB paper.

~

I'd like to add an epilogue about something fascinating. I made the "Angelfish" on the shore of this salt lake:

Now, whilst wandering around this shore, my shoes sinking into the salt/mud, I recognized some barely noticeable movement in a small puddle of salt-water. Upon a very close look, to my amazement, tiny and very strange red dragons I had never seen before were fluttering around in the extremely saline water. 

Any idea what they are? Maybe I've discovered a new species!*

*Thanks a lot to the one and only Phil Rogers, who with his comment shed light on my ignorance: They are brine shrimp larvae.

Hagia Sophia - Two Views

Despite all its problems, it still is a privilege to be living in this megacity that has few peers from a historical perspective. It is very rich in super-symbolic icons from Islam and Christianity. One of these is the 1600+ years old Hagia Sophia, a Unesco World Heritage Site, which was built as a church, then was converted to a mosque, then a museum, and finally, since a couple of years back, is a mosque again. Being one of those super-symbolic icons, it has been fiercely fought over as to what ideology it should serve. My guess is that the fight ain't over yet.

These are two views from Hagia Sophia, when it was still a museum. One is an interior made from the upper gallery, the other is an outward view from a window on the upper gallery, towards the Blue Mosque - another icon - in the distance. I love harsh mid-day sun for this kind of architecture. I think it defines the form of a curved dome very nicely.

The negs for these photos are from 2007 but the prints are from a few weeks ago. I was going through my negative archive, inspecting them with a loupe (a reversed 50mm lens actually...it does the job), and was struck by the beauty of these two adjacent MF frames. 

Yes, just like a print, negs can be beautiful in their own right. Then I saw that these were Delta400 developed in Perceptol (1+1), a developer I haven't used for ages. Naturally I was curious how they would print. And boy, do they print nicely! The only extra exposure I gave was a bit at the top on both prints; nothing major. The scanner couldn't preserve it, and I'm not too finicky about it either, but there is the tiniest detail in the whites of the upper windows in the interior view.

I also have to add that the optic these negs were made with is amongst the very best I've ever used: a Bronica 65mm f/4 on a Bronica RF645. It's a shame that despite some very nice haptics, the camera is a bit temperamental and not the pinnacle of reliability, but its lenses are absolutely phenomenal. This statement is no hyperbole at all.

The prints are on 24x30cm Ilford Classic paper.

I haven't been to Hagia Sophia since I made these pictures. That's 16 years now. Wow, time does fly. But Istanbul has been so overrun with tourists over the last decade, that every time I passed the church/museum/mosque I saw the endless queues and couldn't muster the determination for another visit.

So, that was it today. Hope it was worth your time. That's the big question, isn't it? Will it be worth my time? Everybody wants our time these days. At least this place is ad free. And by the way, don't bother checking the prices for the Bronica RF645 now! They've become pretty steep. Also, given their track record for reliability, buying one without extensively using and checking it would be a huge risk.

Cheers...and cherish the light!

Reimagining Negatives

One of the better things I've done in my photographic life is to consistently have made contact prints; right from the very first roll. You could say I have a print of every frame I've ever exposed.

Contact sheets might be the best proof that %99 of what we do sucks. Frame after frame it's a hard slap in the face. The vast but unavoidable "waste" to get good pictures is staggering. Yet, they also ruthlessly reveal our shortcomings as photographers, which means they are excellent feedback if we make the effort to listen. We might even see who we really are as a person. "Know thyself" and all that. 

But I want to show something with much less gravitas. You might even find it ridiculous. Anyway...the gold mine they are for new "discoveries", whilst going through my contacts for the thousandth time one day last year, I realized that parts of two consecutive frames could work as one picture. An instance where life took a serendipitous turn; where stars mysteriously aligned. After I made a print of that first "discovery" - the top photo - there was no stopping. All of a sudden, I was frantically going through all my contact sheets with a completely different mindset, trying to see a "bigger picture".

Here I was photographing for a zine where the theme was "Sleep".

All prints on Ilford RC Satin paper.

Needless to say, this is not a novel idea. For example, Gene Smith incorporated part of an adjacent frame into one of his pictures*. Although in that case it wasn't meant to be obvious; he was a journalist after all.

I printed a set of photographs like these and left it at that. Thinking about them now, I feel the end result being completely detached from the photographer's original intent is a problem that can't be simply brushed away. With the word "intent" I mean that which is within the normal photographic frame, i.e. that which the photographer intended to photograph in the first place. So, in the more likely worst case, reframings like these are prone to become a gimmick; but in the best case, I suppose they can become a surrealist's dream.

*Described in an essay by John T. Hill, at the end of the book "W. Eugene Smith - The Camera As Conscience".

Affan Coffeehouse

The Affan Coffeehouse in Antakya (the historic Antioch), a two-storey stone structure, was built between 1911 and 1913. The architects were French and the stonemasons came from Aleppo. It's been run by four generations of the same family*. 

As the dust from the recent earthquakes begins to settle, news about people and places that crossed my life begin to trickle through. I stumbled upon the Instagram account of the Affan Coffeehouse and from their latest posts saw that the upper floor has sustained significant damage from the quakes, but the ground floor is intact. Luckily, no-one in their family was hurt.

From the Instagram account "affankahvesi"

I was in Antakya as part of a trip in January 2007 and made the intro photo in the Affan Coffeehouse whilst enjoying a cup of tea. The man was totally immersed in the fortunes - or perhaps misfortunes - the cards were revealing. I wonder what happened to him.

A 24x30cm print I made in 2021 on Ilford Classic paper. The film was 35mm Tri-X.

*The info in this paragraph is from their website Affan Kahvesi.

Tri-X From 1967

Whilst photographer Elif Gülen was going through the belongings of her late father, painter Ercan Gülen, to her amazement she found several bulk rolls of film dating from 1967! That's two years before man walked on the moon. Amongst them were three 1000 ft rolls of Tri-X and one 1000 ft roll of Plus-X. 

The atelier we used to meet quivered with excitement when Elif arrived on 11th August 2018 with the worn metal containers. Of course, we all wondered whether the film was still any good and decided to give it a try straight away. Into the darkroom we went, opened one can of Tri-X, felt the film with "oohs" and "aahs" in the darkness, cut off a long strip and spooled it onto a cassette. After quickly shooting through the roll, taking pictures of each other fooling around, the film went straight into developer.

Well, in the video you can see the buzz. Yes, there were images! On no less than 51-year-old film. Then I made this picture, which for me is a summary of that day.

Flatbed scan from a Ilford WT FB semi-matt print

From left to right: Jason Eskenazi, Elif Gülen, Taylan Bağcı, Dinçer Dökümcü, Erdem Varol. All accomplished photographers.

~

In the wake of the two devastating earthquakes in Turkey and days of bitter tears, I wanted to write a post about a time when life was still pretty good. Yeah, we all had our own little problems, but looking back - it wasn't that long ago - I see that we were happy, enthusiastic. We were eager to get together. We published zines together. We found joy in our friendship and mutual love for photography. Beginning with the pandemic everybody started to drift apart, physically and psychologically. The economic crisis that followed - exacerbated by utter mismanagement - made life even harder. Here I am today, stunned by the toll of the quakes, at a loss where to look for hope. The political leadership is a disgrace.  Institutions are a wreck. And another major earthquake is imminent in Istanbul.

A Dream Most Strange

I've been plagued by many worries over the last few months, all related to an imminent and permanent move to Germany. Yes, emigration; joining the hordes of professionals who have lost faith in Turkey. Which also means, amongst other things, that my photography and darkroom is in a state of limbo. It's a moment where I wish my whole archive was in a small hard drive, instead of in boxes filling up a room. Maybe this dream I recently had, is connected to my plight:

I'm looking through my Leica rangefinder and focusing on the right eye of the fellow in front of me. He has short hair, a receding hairline, a stubble. He is charming. I'm very very close, right up to his face. In the viewfinder I'm aligning his pupil with its double-image. Surprisingly, there is a camel right behind him, sticking its head into my frame. It will be a wonderful double portrait. I click the shutter. Then I want to make another exposure from a slightly different angle. As I wind on the film, halfway through it gets rough and ratchety and I think "shit, that's not good". But I pull through and make another exposure; after which I can't wind the film at all. Next thing, it's twilight and I'm walking down a slope in a wooden landscape, camera in hand, wondering what to do about it. I wrangle with the horrific idea that I might have to give up on the film, that most likely it is ruined. Eventually I resign, open the camera and start pulling the film out. It looks like this:

Almost as good as a Dürer.

Half of it is like 8mm film. That part is completely black and with torn perforations from the winding. But then, mid-roll the film switches to medium format, with each frame offset like in the drawing above! And these MF frames are developed! They are the most beautiful MF negs I have ever seen, with gorgeous highlights and shadows. I clearly remember one frame: a lit-up chandelier is suspended above a table. The detail in the bulbs is breathtaking. On the table sits a man with longish fluffy hair. He looks remarkably similar to the chess player Hans Niemann, who was recently involved in an ugly stir in the chess world. I look at the negs in awe for a long time...and woke up.

~

This is in the main train station in Istanbul. The lady seemed to be sleeping the sweetest of sleeps. Without the door, and without the Leica M6, I probably wouldn't have made the picture. But with the door and the reflections in the windowpanes, and hoping that the Leica would minimize any disturbance, I couldn't resist. Speaking of how quiet the Leica actually is, I once photographed a guy tanning himself on the beach from at least 50 meters. He turned around and looked at me. He had heard the click! 

The print is on 24x30cm Ilford MG Classic and the 35mm neg is Kodak Tmax400. Lovely film - I used it for many years - but now out of my budget.