A great deal has happened over the past month. It’s interesting to be entering what everyone calls the “real world” at new years. Getting myself settled into my new routine feels like I’m setting up a new years resolution, when really I’m just setting up my life after school. I’ve graduated from college, purchased my own large format camera, and been working on setting up an approximation of a darkroom set up in my apartment. There have been a few challenges, among them figuring out how to get silver nitrate stains off bathroom walls (bleach, as it turns out, works wonderfully for this.)
I’ve started getting more hours at work now that I’m out of school. I’m still part time, but I’m a less poor part time laborer. This suits me just fine as it leaves me plenty of time for writing, photography, and gaming. I’ve been working on a few projects on the writing front, but I’ve been pretty inactive since finals. I picked up bookbinding for fun, and have a few nice results. Haven’t shot much since finals, but I’ll be getting back to that soon, now that things have settled down somewhat after the holidays.
One of my goals is to start posting on here more often, including updates on my life, what I’m working on at the time, and photos of my developing equipment collection. To that end, here are a few photos of things I’ve been working on:
I’ve started getting more hours at work now that I’m out of school. I’m still part time, but I’m a less poor part time laborer. This suits me just fine as it leaves me plenty of time for writing, photography, and gaming. I’ve been working on a few projects on the writing front, but I’ve been pretty inactive since finals. I picked up bookbinding for fun, and have a few nice results. Haven’t shot much since finals, but I’ll be getting back to that soon, now that things have settled down somewhat after the holidays.
One of my goals is to start posting on here more often, including updates on my life, what I’m working on at the time, and photos of my developing equipment collection. To that end, here are a few photos of things I’ve been working on:
This is my latest darling, a Calumet 4x5 view camera. I purchased the lens separately, built the lens board, and put it all in working order. It’s all metal meaning it's heavy, but sturdy. It’s actually too heavy for my tripod, as when I put it on the tripod it bent the head of the tripod. (it should be noted I have a cheap plastic tripod that I’ve been using for years with smaller cameras, and was never intended for a camera of this size.)
This camera hasn’t received a name yet, but I’m open to suggestions.
This camera hasn’t received a name yet, but I’m open to suggestions.
"Bell Book and Candle" the first successful tintype made with the new camera. This one was lit entirely by floor and table lamps, shot in the middle of the night Christmas Eve. It took several hours to get the exposure right, and I finally settled on a 20 min exposure time at f4.5. I varnished the plate the next morning, framed it Christmas night, and gave it away as part of a Yankee Swap the next day with my Fiancée’s family.
We matted it in a classic decorative Matte my Fiancée made and Tea stained that just happened to crop in the corners enough to cover that dark shadow. She made the matte before the plate was finished, and I was thrilled when I saw how it fit.
We matted it in a classic decorative Matte my Fiancée made and Tea stained that just happened to crop in the corners enough to cover that dark shadow. She made the matte before the plate was finished, and I was thrilled when I saw how it fit.
I've been working on building a role-playing game system on and off for a few months now. The basic mechanics are all worked out at this point, but I realized that in order to play test this game I would need a world to play in, and that most game systems that have a distinctive flavor also come with a well developed setting for gamers to use. To that end, I've begun building an appropriate setting to showcase my system. This is the world map I made a few days back. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing profiles on each of these nations and various organizations that are influential in this world, as well as a bit of the history of the world.
As I mentioned above, I’ve taken up bookbinding. I saw a tutorial about it online a few weeks back and thought about all the scrap matte board I had lying around after cutting windows for my photographs, and decided I’d try my hand at using the scraps for book covers. My fiancée volunteered some scrap fabric left over from old projects, and fabric pieces she’d been given but decided not to use, and I started putting together books. I then took old prints, misprints, and various other photographs I didn’t want to keep as such, and began looking for things that would make interesting inside covers. In this case, I used two contact prints on RC paper, made off 4x5 negatives I shot a few years ago.
RSS Feed
