goyablog

A box from Freestyle Photo came via FedEx today, which meant that the photo fixer I ordered arrived, which meant that I could try to develop the paper negatives I exposed yesterday in the Anyway35 pinhole camera I made. Granted, I have never developed anything in my life and didn’t even know what a paper negative is until a few days ago. But, TGFTW (Thank God For The Web). After a bit a googling and great advice and encouragement from a real photographer, Chris Keeney, I decided to experiment. The Anyway35 Pinhole is designed to take 3.5×3.5″ paper negatives. The first thing I learned is that it’s hard to cut accurately 5×7 photo paper to 3.5×3.5 in a darkroom.
Lesson #1: build template for paper cutting and make it a little bigger than 3.5x.3.5
With untested pinholes and photo papers the science of exposure times and focus and framing is turned into a crap shoot, albeit an educated by trial-and-error crap shoot. So, I set up a shot that would be in sun and shade at the same time and have differently-textured objects at different depths of field. I also did a shot of the same scene after it clouded over.
Lesson #2: 30-40 seconds in afternoon sun; 120 seconds in cloudy; shade exposure time not yet determined, but I’m guessing at least 3 minutes.
Lesson #3: Developing film/prints takes patience and a modicum of precision (unless you what to pass off mistakes as “artsy”); i.e., fix and wash your prints better!
Lesson #3 was learned when I forgot/was too lazy to double check fixing and wash times. I woefully underestimated the length of time and the amount of agitation necessary for fixing and washing. As a result, I got a mess of spots and streaks on my negative.
Lesson #4: Developing paper negatives “Caffenol” (Folger’s instant coffee crystals, Arm & Hammer Washing Soda, Vitamin C, and water) works and it doesn’t smell like “grim death” as one guy put it. Normal developing chemicals smell worse.
I want to do contact prints from the negatives (the positive “prints” you see below were produced by scanning into Photoshop and inverting the image), but need a 15w bulb and some plate glass. I also need to be more careful adhering the photo paper to my camera back, using less adhesive. Sticky gunk was left on the back of the negatives and that’ll mess up a contact print. Patient rubbing got the gunk off (afraid to take Goo Gone to it), but there are better ways,.
Lesson #5: Digital photography is FAR more efficient and instantly gratifying and easier and everything else, but this low-fi alternative process photography is interesting and gratifying in its own alchemical way. I’m not even considering it photography per se; rather, it’s playing with the play of light on material surfaces and with substances to produce images (I guess that’s what “photo-graphy” means…). Of course, Sara has known this for ages with her analog cameras, but to build a camera from scratch and develop the exposure you took with it goes even further. Yeah, I screwed up the developing, but I got some images. It worked — the Christmas gift tin I made a pinhole camera out of and the Folger’s Crystals mixed with Washing Soda and Ascorbic Acid produced images on paper where there had been none:

#1 (35-second exposure in sun and shade):

#2 (120-second exposure in mostly cloudy):

Browsing through Vimeo turned up this pretty neat Tokyo-inspired video:

Rapid Eye Movement from POWSKII on Vimeo.

It is a dirty, not-so-secret truth that tenure review often involves personalities and politics neatly disguised as dispassionate assessment of scholarship—a process shrouded in secrecy and protected by confidentiality. On occasion, faculty reviewers, whose own tenure may have been awarded decades earlier under standards far less stringent, are positioned to make weighty judgments about colleagues, sometimes with limited appreciation for the potentially devastating ramifications. In the corporate world, by contrast, managers empowered to promote or terminate subordinates must at least put their names and reputations on the line.

In our cloistered academic settings, we tacitly assume that senior faculty members, after having survived the tenure grind, magically come to possess the necessary expertise and talent to carry out this awesome task with humanity and respect, not to mention fairness.

(James Alan Fox, commenting in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the February 12th shootings at UAH)

Follow-up: From a comment posted in reference to Dr. Fox’s article:

I think there is a need for an overhaul in tenure at many schools, and for sure there is a need to clearly define the goals and achievements tenure candidates will be judged. If you are lucky enough to work for a university where fairness and transparency is the rule, then I believe you are very fortunate. I have seen some unbelievably shocking treatment of tenure track professors, and from discussions at international meetings, everyone seems to have a horror story to tell. One of the worst comments I heard from our Dean was, “Why would we want to tell tenure candidates how they would be judged, since if we did this they would all get tenure!” Transparent, indeed… I was fortunate to have read the tea leaves correctly and I had a strong mentor supporting me, but not all are so lucky.

I wonder where Vanderbilt fits in this context….?