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!