Hey look I got a post in for March

The last bundle of photographs I have in my “Finished” folder was from basically exactly one month ago. Needless to say March has not been all that productive. It’s not even that I’ve drifted away from making photographs I’ve just been sucked in to other avenues. I’ve been reading a lot, and have recently been digging in to a close reading of Plotinus’ Enneads as well as Proclus’ Elements of Theology. I’ve also been going through the process of working out how to build up the new Rivendell Appaloosa that I purchased, a dream bike of mine that I’ve wanted for years. So my interests have been drifting to and fro. But damn was it pretty out the last couple days.

Also, it kind of feels that we’re definitively done with winter at this point. We had one good final snow a couple weeks ago and Jess and I got out to take advantage of one last ski. The last few days you can walk outside and things look green, and the light is warm, and something about that weird viriditas flowing through things apparently struck me as beautiful enough to want to grab a camera and make pictures.

I took a couple walks through the neighborhood, as one does. Once with the old Canon 5D and a second one a day or so later with the Leica. I still have a weird contentious relationship with the Leica, as I’ve talked about before. Like I’ve said, I’ve made more photos with a Leica rangefinder than any camera over the years of making pictures but lately it just feels a little loose compared to using an SLR where it feels like seeing the actual image that will go to the sensor/film means I’m able to be so much more deliberate about framing and composition. Anyways, you’ve heard all this before so I’ll stop rambling about it.

I shot the first of the ten rolls of C41 in the fridge the other day as well when we took a walk in the woods one morning to get some energy out of the pup (it didn’t work, he was still insane, send help). I’m still procrastinating on mixing up the chemicals and trying C41 development at home. I need to find a way to get the chemicals to 103 degrees without having to buy one of those sous vide things. I think I can just fill the sink with hot water and get the developer up to 103 and it should be good for the 3 or so minutes of development time you need for C41. The other steps are less temperature critical. I’ll practice with water and see how things go.

I’ve also been going through the laborious process of rescanning all of my film negatives and saving them on to a designated external hard drive. That’s a tedious job, but in the process I was scanning some old C41 film and came across a best practice for scanning color film with decent results. It’s nothing secret, I think it’s what most people do but I’ve never given it enough effort to figure it out until now. I make raw scans of the negative in Silverfast and then do the color inversion with Negative Lab Pro. I was getting frustrated to the point of just saying, “Fuck it” to even bothering with C41 but the raw scan + NLP process is really good. So at this point I’m just trying to shoot more of the C41 to try and force myself to have to develop it…

That’s all from me for now, so I’ll leave you with this handful of photographs and my meandering ramblings. As always, if you ended up here somehow and made it this far, thanks for looking