I needed a break from all this uptight pushing and shoving. So I brewed some tea.
Sing your hearts away
Drift until you brutalize
More experimentation with cyanotypes and toning in coffee. These are all old negatives.
Blues in my bread
I haven’t worked much with cyanotypes because I don’t really care for blue prints. But with Covid keeping me out of the darkroom and all the ingredients sitting in my studio, it made sense to try.
A little research made it clear that toning gave me more options than just blue. Here are the results so far. look for more as I work through the process.
The blue
The black: coffee
The gold: tea
Living together
We got a COVID kitten.
Can’t shake the feeling
Went out with the Nikon fm2 and a roll of Svema MZ3. Makes the world seem darker.
Long time passing
The garden is in bloom!
Long live Diana
The good thing about Diana’s is that they are still relatively cheap. I picked up a new one off the eBay and took it for a spin yesterday.
These are shot in Ilford FP4+ and stand developed in HC-110.
Där får man värme och ljus
Plans change. Normally we would go to western Massachusetts to celebrate midsommar in late June. But we were supposed to be in Italy and France around this time. Then the plague came. That’s how we ended up celebrating the solstice in this lovely house in Paxinos (pack-SAI-nus) PA.
Moke from Shamokin
Shamokin is a coal town in central PA. It seems to have been hit hard by the loss of coal and industry jobs and the opioid crisis. The population is about 7,000 now, down from a peak of 50,000 in the 50s.
Shamokin has an interesting labor history, including the Shamokin Uprising of 1877.
I only spent a few hours there—barely enough to scratch the surface.
RIP Diana
I dropped the Diana maybe one too many times and it seems it’s gone to meet its maker.
Here are some of the last salvageable images from it. They feel melancholy and reflect my muddy view of the past few weeks.
