Back to the Darkroom

Last week my friend Pat from Australia came to visit. We both have a big passion for photography and decided to take advantage of my mothers old darkroom equipment which had been abandoned in our studio. There was no dark space we could adapt in our studio, so we moved everything to my mothers new house, into the utility room.
Pat and I both searched high and low for the developing tanks for film, but with no luck. Instead of wasting time we thought we'd spend the time experimenting with Black & White photographic paper. We cut the right sizes and loaded our cameras. I was using my 4x5 Crown Graphic, and Pat was using his 120 pin hole camera. The results were better than we had expected and it was great to be able to run down stairs after shooting and popping the sheets of paper into the trays to see the pictures apear. Man I love being back in the darkroom!

Here are some of the shots I took (all of which have been scanned in and inverted.)

(This is the first portrait I took of Pat, click on the image to see the quality.)

(I'm out of focus, I must have placed my head slightly more forward than Pat.)

(My brother and his girlfriend came by the house so I took a quick portrait of them both, they are brutally honest pictures.)

(The portraits are great but creating scenes of narrative is what I love to do most of all! Click on the image to see larger.)

Now I want to experiment with black & white film and then possibly hand tinting my prints..This was something I did earlier today.

(These are just a pictures I took of the photos with my phone.)

Three golden apples

The story and idea came from the greek myth - "After Atalanta participated in the hunt and received the pelt, her father claimed her as his offspring and wanted her to get married. Although a very beautiful maiden, Atalanta did not particularly want to marry after an oracle told her that she will gain bad luck if she marries. In order to get her a husband, her father made a deal with Atalanta that she would marry anybody who could beat her in a foot race. Atalanta happily agreed, as she could run extremely fast.

She outran many suitors. The one that finally became her husband accomplished this through brains, not speed. Hippomenes (also known as Melanion) knew that he could not win a fair race with Atalanta, so he prayed to Aphrodite for help. The goddess gave him three golden apples (sometimes the fruit was quince instead) and told him to drop them one at a time to distract Atalanta. Sure enough, she quit running long enough to retrieve each golden apple. It took all three apples and all of his speed, but Hippomenes finally succeeded, winning the race and Atalanta's hand."