Finally back home, thank you very much!

Actually been home for a few days as it happen. I've just been a bit busy, and have not had too much time for the things I really like to play around with. 
That said, I'm just out of the darkroom after finally getting some spare time to kill, and it's 01.32 in the morning. Time flies when you got stuff like that to do, but of course you know everything about that already. 
Also I've had a few films developed some time last week. Most of them seem to have come out good enough for my standards, so that's great really. 
Printed a couple of the latest negs this evening, but I'm rusty as heck to be honest. Made all sorts of beginner mistakes with both filters, apertures, timer and what on earth have we. 
I'm sure it will be better at some point tomorrow. 

I'm also working on this new darkroom timer. I'm not absolutely sure I can make it, to be honest, because it involves some sort of damn micro-controller-puterthing-programming... and I'm not too sure I can cope with it. We will see, but I might just invest some time into the thing as I'm also investigating the possibility of installing leds in my enlarger. In that case I need to program the damn micro controller no matter...
Anyway, it's not going to be a showstopper for any printing as I already got a very useable enlarger using the normal bulb and the condensers. Would be great to be able to use it as a diffuser as well, but as I said... we will have to wait and see. Probably for some time...

Well. 
Nothing much more to say right now, as it's too far into the next day already. 
I give you a scan of one of the recent films just for now, and hope to see you again very soon! 
It's a lousy snap of a castle we've seen before, and the development of the film didn't flow well either, by the way. Got some sort of bubbles of foam inside the tank which obviously did do some harm on the film surface itself. 
It's not exactly the end of the world, though. 

Oh yes, we had a couple of grey days there over in Scotland. We're pretty used to it though, so no big deal at all. A nice pile of stone, this one!!

Steaming

Not that it's particularly hot or anything. It's the ship doing what we call steaming, towards shore and Rio de Janeiro and me going home. I will not even try to ask any of you how good you might think that is, as I don't know any of the fully right expressions in english to properly describe the feeling to give you a decent answer anyway.

It's been one of those days, for some blokes reason. Can't and won't even start on that on here. You would get bored, and I would probably get into some sort of trouble. So I leave it be, but still it turned out to be one of those days. You know. 
Didn't even get the time to snap a single frame, I think. Only dealing with stuff related to the above, and then pack my bag which is extremely small and go grab my laundry from downstairs. Oh, and I also went to the bridge to get my passport. They keep them up there, probably to really make us feel trapped for seven weeks. No reason to bother thinking about getting anywhere else as long as your passport is hidden well inside a blue door somewhere tucked down in a cardboard box, is it?

The snaps in this post has no other function besides breaking things up a bit. They are all terrible scans of negs taken in a rather windy place over in Denmark. It was good though, like all windy places near the ocean tends to be. At least that's my experience. Nice beaches as well over there.

I packed my cameras as well. Checked the fridge for the last time, and came to the same conclusion as last time. I need to bring more film for the next trip to work. 
Ordered a bunch of empty film canisters yesterday, from over in England somewhere. Ought to be good I hope. At least they should be better than my old Ilford cans as they really start to show signs of too much use these days. I wanted to try plastic this time. I know I used to have a few of them back in the days, but they must have been thrown away somewhere years ago. At least I can't find them anymore, but then again there's a lot of other stuff I can't find anymore either. That's the sort of things happening when you move around a bit up through the years. Things tend to disappear. 
Some times it's nothing to worry about, other times you'll just be happy for something getting lost, and lots of times you don't even know things are missing until years have passed. Other times you come back to it from time to time and start wondering again and again where it might be right now. I have done that enough with the film cartridges, and my old film loader. They are gone! 
I loaded a few rolls of film some time ago using only a dark room and a thing to hold the bulk spool of film. Worked out well enough, but it's cumbersome and a bit tedious work. You have to measure out the length of the film in total darkness of course, which is the trickiest part of the fun. Nah... I have given up that sport and bought myself a new film loader. Besides, it is of course the only way to find your old one, to buy a new. It has not happened yet, though. 

Another one from the same area as above, but a bit further to the north and east this time, but not by far. Nothing is far in Denmark, as you might guess. 

I ordered paper as well, as a matter of fact. RC paper this time. 8x10 to hopefully get one of my big projects for 2019 started. My so called "archive" is really falling to bits. Not that it has ever been good or anything, but the last time I wanted to print a neg I had to search for a couple of hours or so before I found the right one tucked well away inside one of the too many folders containing old memories. So, I'm going to take some time to start doing contact sheets of the lot. I got a few of that sorts from earlier in life, but I have not been making them for a long time and I know I have to start somewhere to get where I want. Contact sheets are definitely something that will help me. I also have to try date my films the best I can, but that will not be the easiest thing believe me. I might still be able to make out the chronology, which will of course be better than nothing. 
And then there actually are parts of the "archive" dated and numbered, but far from all of it. 
I really like to use contact sheets, but usually when I get the time to slide inside the doors to the darkroom I want to start printing, not doing the boring stuff. And then I forget all about making a contact sheet at the end of the session, of course. 
But now I will be starting the big job for sure. The good thing about it is that I probably will find a few nice and maybe printable negs in the process which might be worth honing my skills at in the darkroom. 
Maybe. 

Same pile of old concrete from a different angle. At least I guess they didn't have to travel far away to find enough sand to build that thing.

Well, my camera bag is packed at I have already told you. It contains three cameras, two of them which is already loaded with film. There are also two passports and a seaman book hidden away in there. There's a few rolls of exposed films as well, and probably an extra wide angle lens for the rangefinders, and some other bits and bobs. I will keep the two loaded cameras ready at hand as we travel to the airport tomorrow. It might be worth it for all we know. 
The blog will probably not be updated the next couple of days. I can't see me bothering writing anything on the airplane unless I'm getting really, really bored. It's a 12,5 hrs. flight from Rio to Amsterdam though, so you never know of course. 
Still I will probably struggle with the uploading, so I might just as well leave it be. 
I'll be back some day soon though, so please stay tuned and I see you around this place then. 

Strachan 3 --->

Sometimes when doing the sorts of work I'm supposed to do, you find yourself laid up for a few days in something which on a good day might go for a walking distance away from a town or a village or whatever. Sometimes this day may fall on a Sunday, and sometimes you got nothing better to do but go for a walk all by yourself just to get away from whatever is going on at work. Sometimes you just have to go for a walk anyway, even though the ship seems to be just about to flip over and the work is piling up in loads in front of you. 

That's just what happened this day, as far as I remember anyway. It's years ago, actually, but I still remember this stroll along dead streets quite well believe it or not. It did me good.

This one has never been printed, and never posted anywhere either. I was looking through the archives to find something interesting, and came up with this one. I got no particular idea why, but I think it might be because of the patterns of the shades of gray inside it. You might see what I'm talking about, or you may not. 

And I got no further comments about this one...

And yes, it's from up there in Peterhead, Scotland. Of course. 
I've been there a lot, and got one or two snaps of the place. This happens to be one of them. 

See, they listen

I'm a member of the local photo club. Or camera club, or whatever.
It might sound like a confession of some sort, and partly it is, but I also got a reason or two for doing it. First of all that's all I "do" when I'm at home. OK, a truth with quite a few modifications, but at least that's all I'm doing that most people would be able to refer to as a slight proof of me trying to have some sort of social relationship with somebody else but the closest family. That's also a truth with quite a lot of modifications, but still I'm probably not too visible to most people when I'm at home and away from the sea. Nobody I really know are making a big fuzz of it either, as they know my job requires not only a few sacrifices through a normal year. Many, as it happens.
Anyway, to get my back ends out of the house sometimes I thought I might just as well join the photo club rather than the gardening club or something like that. Just so I would have a slight idea about what to answer should anyone think it would be wise to throw a question into my direction or something. 
But enough of that, and over to more of the same.

It's a great collection of snappers among the members in there, even though the majority are only busy collecting pixles when pointing their cameras all around the place. The only person I've been talking to yet, who is also having a bit more than just the usual historical interest in working with film, would be the polish girl. A young individual of the sorts she is, mind, but that just makes it better me thinks. I like young people trying film, and I can't deny that little fact. 
There's a meeting in this club every first Monday each month, but I miss most of them, of course. Normally I will maybe attend 3 or 4 meetings each year, which of course is not very good if you're still thinking this is the only time I'm close to having a social relationship with people. I assure you again, it's not the entire truth about that matter. 
It's a great club, obviously, because members are winning nice prizes and such. Getting their names mentioned in big books and all sorts, which is great I think. I have not had my name, or any of my snaps for that matter, printed in the book yet. 
First step is to enter something, obviously. I never really even get to that point, normally. One day I might find something I feel like throwing in, should I at any point find myself to have made a decent enough print, and then it will be the issue with work of course. There are time limits, you know, and good old Murphy's law will most likely also have a finger deep into that matter. I'm over 50 now, so I can assure you I'm old enough to be able to say something about things like that. 

So what do I do to look important when I finally attend one of the monthly gatherings every now and then? Well, I try to listen to a few of the things being said or told for a start, and then I usually put in my vote for the best picture of the evening. I never seem to vote for the right one though. A different snap will always win for some odd reason. 
And I usually bring a camera. This time when the snap below was snapped, probably a year and a half ago or so, I think I brought a Nikon F3 or something like that. At least it was a good one no doubt, and I snapped up this trio. A trio of artists, to tell you the full truth about it. It's the polish girl, the lawyer and another guy which I'm not at all quite sure about the origins of. But he's a great photographer anyway. And I mean great. The same thing goes for the lawyer as well, selling big artsy snaps combined with paintings stuff sort of things. 
And then there's the polish girls snaps, which are just in a league of their own in my opinion. I don't know if she's won any prizes either, but she should have I can assure you. I know for a fact she won a very nice stipend over in Poland some years ago. Oh yes, she's educated in this field we are talking about and everything. 
Anyway, I sort of dozed off and looked away from what was going on up there at the podium, and used about 1/60 sec. of my life to make this one. 
It's not going to win any prizes either of course, but at least I got it saved. Right there inside my archives, on some film or the other.

See? They Listen!

Saturday night (not at the movies though...)

And still out here in the middle of nowhere. Makes your mood a wee bit darker than it will be one week from now, I hope. 
I found this snap dug deep inside my archives somewhere. It seemed to fit pretty well, to be honest.

Diamonds on my windshield...

I managed to almost fill up my roll of Rollei 120 format film, factory oomphed to 400 level, with snaps during the day. Actually I think there's only one single frame left on it, but by tomorrow evening I would think it should be all gone. A good feeling for sure, as if you don't know that already. I used the Diana F+, as that's the only camera around this ship using that sort of film at the moment. Actually there's a few pinhole cameras I could have loaded up, of course, but bringing the exposed film home from Brazil is only going to give me a lot of hassle on the airport, so I leave it be. 

Talking about pinhole cameras; Years ago, maybe 5 or so, I bought a few "precision drilled" pinholes from somewhere. Probably on the foreign auction site on the interweb or something. 
Well, whatever! Today I thought I'd just turn my small traveling bag for photographic related stuff on it's head and have a good look through it, and whaddayaallknow and such... there they were. Neatly and very well hidden inside some totally secret pocket or something for sure, but still there they were after all those years. I might even go home and have one or two of them tested, if I don't manage to throw them away by accident before I'm on the flight from Rio to Amsterdam wednesday evening. 
I'll make sure to let you know if they work. The holes, that is.
Oh, and I just gave myself a promise to clear out the internals of all my photo bags every 5 years or so from now on. There might be other gems hidden, for all we know. 

It's late, again

It's late Friday evening. Soon the last weekend on board the ship is gone, and I have to get my stuff together and leave for home. It's a lovely thought to just hang on to for a few moments.
The last few days of a trip is more or less only routine work you need to get done to make life a bit easier for my back to back. He who is soon about to pack his bag and leave his nice little home out there on one of the many Faroe isles and head south. Good luck with that, may I say.

Somewhere in Scotland a few years back. Seems like a little lifetime ago sitting on board the vessel over here in Brazilian waters. I would rather be up there, walking the abandoned country roads, camera in hand talking to stray sheepdogs and snapping outbuildings like this one. Different surroundings, very different people. And different dogs too, just saying.

I checked the fridge in my cabin earlier this evening. Only two rolls left of 135 format Ilford FP4+ in there. I will probably load up one of the rangefinders for the trip home, leaving only one roll left in there. Looks like I need to bring a few rolls next time then. 
There were plenty of 120 format film hidden in there however, so I loaded up the Diana F+ with a roll of some 400 ASA Rollei film I got a while ago and walked down to shoot a couple of snaps in the engine control room. I'll save the rest of the frames on the roll for the next couple of days. See if I can find something half interesting on the bridge or somewhere. Maybe on deck, or in the ROV control room. There's probably always something happening to waste some film on, somewhere. Even out here.
I very rarely use Rollei film for some reason. Never really got the hang of the developing side of that stuff. I brought with me a slow roll of it when snapping a set of wedding pictures not too long ago. I mean what in the world was I thinking? Luckily I also had a couple of rolls of FP4 in the bag, which sort of saved my back end of course. Sometimes you would be far better off by attaching your brains to the rest of your body before leaving home, actually. 

Here they are, the happy couple. Snapped on the english film, not the Rollei Retro thing. Done with the huge Mamiya camera and everything. Not the best of light conditions under these trees, mind you, but they got what they wanted even though I should have taken a couple of extras just in case. But they will be happy with the prints anyway. I promise!

I'll leave you all to it. You're probably asleep anyway, most of you.
And if not, at least I'm sleeping quite soon, by the feel of this aging body. 
Take care!

Looking for that little something, again

There's probably at least a couple of ways to do this.
You may either choose to sit down and wait for something to happen, or you can actually try to find it floating around somewhere.
Inspiration, that is.
You probably know what I'm talking about, because from what I hear and read it seems to be a thing we all seem to lack from time to time. Some more often than others, of course.
Me, myself, I'm looking for something doing some sort of "kick-my-bottoms" thing while at the same time I'm holding a camera.
It's not the easiest thing to find around this place, on board a ship for seven weeks in a row. Not that I'm looking for something to snap a lot out here at sea, but it would be nice to have an idea of a decent project to start when you get home. A loose plan like, you know.

They decided to drill a huge hole in the mountain a few years ago. Just as well, me thinks, because the center of town used to be filled up with cars and noise all the time. Nowadays most of them just disappear into the hole, being kept away from the streets. Most of them, of course. Not all!

Some tiny but maybe nice little idea crept into my brains about a week ago, and I've been trying to think a few things through since then. I seem to have filled quite a few pages inside my notebook about it and all. Not that my words will help me much in the end I guess, but at least it looks good in some sort of strange way.
You see I've been listening to some music lately. Of course I have been listening to those same records more or less since I was 10 or 12, so it's nothing new believe me, but this time it might be different anyway.
Oh yes, you got it. I somehow felt like I might use some of the words and chords inside a few of these records to actually do a small project with snaps. I know it has been done before, so it's nothing brand new in that respect, but still a bit fresh to me anyway. I still have to narrow it down, of course, and I also still have to think a bit more about what to do and how to get it done, but I might get there some day. And if not, it's not like it's the end of the world, or something.
I'll be perfectly fine even if I end up finding I made a total failure of the whole idea.

I don't know, but there was something about the bending roads, the lights and the flow of it all that cached my view. I can't see it that clear in retrospect, to be honest. It's from the same hole as above.

I had a message coming through on Facebook a few days ago. A woman I know from way back wanted me to put photos up on a few of the walls inside her little, but quite special and to my standard rather well visited gallery at some point next year. I have yet to respond in a somewhat clear language, but it's a bit tempting... If I can get both myself and a few prints together that is, of course.
I want nothing like the last minute stuff I had to do the last time I had prints hanging on the wall of the bigish library in my home town for a month. There should have been better stories told, I think. And then I think the lines were not falling together as I'd have liked them to. It was more like they were falling apart... which is no good, truth been told.
But hey, that's learning by doing, isn't it?  I might even find some inspiration in that little fact, for all we know?!

I've been to Trinidad, as you might know

Been working over there, in the warm waters of the Caribbean and stuff like that. It was OK, looking at things in total. Quite a bit warmer than back home anyway, but I don't think I could live like that all year around. I must say it's a bit nice to have four seasons, after all. Maybe not all four seasons in one day, as we sometimes do up where I live, but nevertheless it's nice to get to feel some weather every once in a while. 

Also, it's nice to know you can always get home and find the occasional pole more or less ribbed for cables. It's nothing like that in Trinidad, mind you! 

Getting closer to Port of Spain

Getting even closer to Port of Spain, even though "stuck in traffic" suddenly got a new meaning for me...

I had to get away from the ship and run over to this little shop in Bergen before we left old Norway heading for Trinidad. Had to get myself a half decent camera, because for some reason I did not bring one for this trip, something that has never happened before actually. I ended up with a thing I got lenses for at home anyway, and something that didn't cost me too much money. E eventually got away with a reasonably worn down Nikkormat with a 50mm f/2 lens attached. I think the shop owner was just happy to see them go out the doors, to be honest. Anyway, the camera worked for the entire trip, which was my goal after all. It's still alive, of course, and will probably stay that way for a long time yet. I don't think they are easily broken, them things. 

Let's have another go, shall we?!

As some of you may have noticed there has been little or nothing said from inside this place during the last year. Sometimes that happens, I guess. With blogs, you know. You stop for some reason, and then just never really gets back into the habit of writing a few words every now and then. 
I'll give it another go, as I really like both a bit of writing and to show a few snaps should I happen to have something worth posting at any point in time. 
I have not been playing around inside the darkroom as much as I'd like to lately, and my desk is pretty much overfilled with films in desperate need of a bath of developer. I will get that sorted out when I get home from work. And that's a promise! 
There should be stuff from quite a while back, I presume, but that should be fine I think. For most of you out there, anyway. 

I'm in Brazil for the moment. Or I'm off the coast of Brazil to be a bit more exact about it, but at least we work out from there right now. Been to Rio de Janeiro and all, but didn't take the chance to bring any of my two rangefinders out of the ship on the only day we had the chance to walk a bit around parts of the city. I was going to a place to do a medical test, so I didn't assume I got the chance to move much around anyway. Well, at least I should have brought along the half frame camera I had in the bag. But it's too late now, anyway. I might get the chance again, so I'll be a tiny bit more wise in the camera selection to bring over for the next trip. 
This is not the place you would walk on the streets with the most expensive equipment hanging from your shoulder. Just saying.

It's a hotel room in Port of Spain, Trinidad. So now you know what that looks like, obviously.

Earlier I've spent most of the year so far in Trinidad and around those bits of the world. It was nothing much to write home about, but way too warm for a man more used to temperatures around six degrees most of the year. It was an interesting experience, though. It's a different culture, and rather very much so actually.  Very obvious when you are waiting for something ordered and due to show up on the quayside at a particular time of some earlier specified day. In the end you might start wonder if you got the year right...

And then the difference in culture also gets pretty obvious if you move around in the traffic. By car, rather than by foot. I don't think I'll say much more about that.

Here you go. Proceed on your own risk,  but don't claim you was not warned! The sign might seem to be a bit hidden away and hard to notice you think, but I can assure you it will get worse. A lot worse! 

I'm sorry for the usual bad quality film scans, of course. I'll try to sort that out on at least some posts in the future. I can't promise there will be print scans only, but at least I hope to be able to show a few every now and then. 
See you again soon, hopefully! And I hope most of my tiny audience might come back even though I've been out of the game for a while. 

A few prints and some history from way back

There's not too many very well known people born and bred in this tiny little corner of the world to tell the truth. A few for sure, but they seem to be a bit far between I have to admit. 
But if we travel a bit back in time, around a thousand years plus, this area have seen a couple of celebrities... some of them for the wrong reasons looking at things with contemporary eyes, but well known they were nonetheless. 

This guy, for instance, known around this part of the world to once have been answering to the name "Gange Rolv", but to the rest of Europe he's probably better known by the name of "Rollo". The scholars are yet not 100% sure if Gange Rolv and Rollo actually was the same person, but it seems they are getting very close to that conclusion these days. Good old Snorre we know from over in Iceland were absolutely sure they were the same guy, and there's a lot of other written sources suggesting the same.
Anyway, Gange Rolv was born some time in the later part of the 800's on this tiny island called Giske just off the town of Ålesund a very long time before this place became a town or a city at all. 
He was the son of Ragnvald Jarl (Earl Ragnvald) who was the earl of the greater part of the north-western Norway, or my home district as we know it today as Møre og Romsdal. 
Gange Rolv was a big man and got the prefix added to his name because it was said to be impossible for him to use a horse. "Gange" means "walking" in norwegian, so "Walking Rolv" would be his name translated to english. They bred small horses back in the days, I assume.

Gange Rolv was a viking, and he was obviously quite successful in his profession. He was a viking, but did not always travel far away to rob, steal and do the things the vikings usually did. He did a lot of raids towards other viking earls in Norway as well, and the Norwegian king at the time (Harald Hårfagre, or Harald Fairhair in english) eventually had to chase him away and out of the country to stop him robbing his opposing earls.
According to Snorre he then went off together with his sworn men to do viking raids over in the outer and inner Hebrides and all around the Irish Sea area before he went over to France. I also think I've read somewhere that he stayed for a while in Orkney, and probably also on Shetland. It was a natural route for him to travel anyway as all those what we call the western isles were very well known to the vikings around the time of these happenings.
Eventually when finally hitting the french coastline he actually conquered Normandie and became the first Duke of Normandie in the year 911. Our man came to an agreement with the french king Karl for himself and his men to settle down in the area of the Seine delta if they at the same time could manage to keep the area safe and clean of other vikings who were prone to try get to Paris for obvious reasons. So they did, and nothing much more have been written about Rollos time of reign down there. 
However we do know that he was baptized around 912 but that he still was said to have died a pagan, probably some time between 928 and 932. 
His descendants still ruled the area as the dukes of Normandie a long time after his death, and one of them even became the king of England (William the Conqueror, his great grandsons great grandsons son) in 1066. 

The statue showing up in these snaps and prints are placed in the middle of the biggest park of my home town, and is a copy of what is an original marble statue standing outside the Cathedral of Rouen in France. Our statue is however made out of bronze, and was unveiled back in 1911. It was a gift from the city of Rouen to Ålesund town. It has really taken on a very nice patina over the years, and I like it even more as the years goes by. 

The prints were done in a bit of hurry, but they still looks a lot better than these phone snaps of them I have to say. I don't know what it is, but the way my phone decides to render the tones of a nice B&W print is a mystery to me. I tried to adjust a bit on the first one up there, but the left side of the print went a bit warm while the other side still looks a tad on the cold side. Well, it is what it is. 

Light Lith rusty tones

Just wanted to give you a quick look at the red tones I got on the Fotokemika Emaks paper in Lith developer before I decided to drop it into the selenium toner bath the other day. The iPhone snap of this print is probably a bit off when it comes to rendering the actual tones and color of the print, but it's all I got I'm afraid, and it does not look too far off on my monitor anyway. 
This one is from a box of grade 3 paper, but it's still noticeably softer than one of my smaller boxes of grade 3 of the same paper. It's probably due to age, but that's just a guess. Still they all are pretty much useless for anything else, so I'll stick with these for my lith developer just for now I think. 
It's old and since long discontinued paper we're talking about, so I'll probably not going to see it again when the few sheets I got has been wasted for good. 

The (more or less) true lith tones of the Emaks paper. Quite warm, as you probably can see. I might throw this one into some selenium toner as well some day, just for good measure. 

The weather is fantastic today as well just as it were yesterday, but freezing cold of course. Damn wind coming in from the north-east, from the siberian area you know. Still not too far below the freezing point, but with this wind and all this sea and moisture around us here on the island it's getting really cold. 
Anyway, I'm off for a short walk and I'll bring a camera today as well. And then the ferry will be here with the mail in just an hour or so, hopefully with a small packet containing a couple of enlarger bulbs. I'm crossing them cold fingers!

Tele glass in the house!

I just picked this "new" lens out of the insides of a cardboard box placed inside my mail box out here on the tiny island. It's got a focal length of 180 mm and is by far the lengthiest one I got for any of my 35 mm cameras. It will fit all my Nikons as it's one of them old and trusty AI-S lenses. This particular one used to live over in California in it's earlier life, owned by a skilled film photographer and darkroom printer. It will now have to keep up with far lower temperatures in the years to come. It's the Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED lens I'm talking about, and my first impression of it is really good I must say. 
I am not a tele-type of snapper at all, and I'm sure this lens will not be used by me every day. I popped it onto the front of my Nikkormat anyway just to give it a go and try to start some sort of relationship with the thing. As I'm totally unfamiliar with long focal lengths like this one it will take some time to get used to it for sure. 

A tiny test print done a while ago on something that looks like Ilford Classic FB paper. 5"x5" or so, nothing big at all. I'll probably come back to this neg some day. The snap itself was done with the 6x6 Rolleiflex on a rather dark and drench day just over the top of the hill behind me, just past that lovely lighthouse up there.

Anyway it looks like a sturdy and chunky piece of kit, and typically it seems to be very well built with the right sorts of materials used in the right places. It's rather heavy and will throw any camera totally out of balance of course. Just like any other lengthy lens will do. 
Fully open it reaches f/2.8 meaning it's a rather fast one, which might come in handy some day for all we know.

Another wrongly exposed neg done one day I was playing around with a handheld filter in front of the Rolleiflex lens. It worked well enough for the skies and such though, so I thought I'd just as well give it a go inside the darkroom. And sure enough I ended up wasting the paper as well as the film bit. And when it all looks pretty hopeless you can always dunk the print into a tray of selenium toner as well just to really mess stuff up. This paper really suck up toner, obviously. 5"x5" print done on Emaks 883 paper of unknown grade from Fotokemika. 

I just spooled a small amount of quite old FP4 film into a film canister which I then threw inside the Nikkormat. I might just as well take a walk around the neighborhood just to check if there's still some life left in that film, and at the same time find out what this heavy piece of glass can be used for. 
I went for a short walk yesterday as well, and sort of thought of a theme I'd like to explore a bit further. This might be the right lens for that job, or maybe I need something a bit shorter. I'll give it a go and let you know, of course. 

Nothing much to talk about regarding this print other than mentioning the fact that it was thrown into some bleach yesterday (after the first couple of issues I had with way too strong mix...). Totally pointless since you can't see what it looked like before of course, but I can inform you that it looked even a bit worse than it does now. The tones in there lies a bit, as my phone seems to have added quite a bit of warmth to it. 5"x7" on Ilford Classic FB paper, ever so lightly toned with Selenium after a very quick overall bleach in Farmers Reducer.

PS! I'm back now, and learned that the 180 mm lens will not be of much use in this tiny little project anyway.

What is a day worth if you don't learn something anyway?

Been home for a few days now, and it has been very good thank you very much!
It's good to be back on the island just doing nothing much except some relaxing stuff and a few bits inside the darkroom. 
The rather well planned darkroom sessions did however suddenly get a bit disrupted as the damn bulb inside my enlarger went south as I was lining up for a second or third go at a few negs I've got around this place. No big issue though, as I also had a few other plans on my list of stuff to get through. Still it was rather annoying, of course. New bulbs should be on their way as we speak, so I hope to carry on some time quite soon. And by the way, I'm really happy to say that this post contains prints only. No film scans, for once. 

OK, these are all just snaps of the actual prints taken with my mobile phone as there's no other way to get this done here on the island. Lack of space and such, you know. Anyway here's more or less what it looks like, a lith print done on old and not very useful Emaks paper. Just have to add that this is after the final treatment (see below). Oh, and yes... the neg was an old one, I know. 

So, today has been the day of doing things I've never done before. 
That said, I also did a few things I've never done before inside the darkroom as well if we take a few steps back and look at stuff I did a few days ago before that bulb broke. 
I did Lith, for the first time as it happen. Not a big deal you might say, but actually it was not that simple either. Didn't do a lot of prints, but maybe 7-8 more or less failures on some 5"x7" paper. The good thing I learned from these couple of short evenings in the dark might well be summed up in just a couple of bullet points:
- Patience is a vertue, and very much needed. Loads of it actually, but probably depending on a few variables anyway.
- My totally useless (for anything else) and quite old batch of Emaks paper suddenly is worth it's weight in gold, or something similar. It has just the look I was after (or at least so it seems, as I still got a very long way to go until I'm hopefully getting a little bit more familiar with the process...) as it seems to contain the right tones and stuff like that. 
But back to the stuff I learned today instead. 
You see I got some farmers reducer in the form of dry chemicals laying inside the darkroom, and decided to give it a try to see how it sort of worked. Well... it works very well as it happens. Way too well to be more precise. Note to self: be a bit more careful when adding Potassium Ferricyanide into the mixture, as it will more or less ruin your prints if you stumble at this point. 
Then, after you've just totally messed up your first print, you may want to double or so the amount of water just for good measure. Still you only need to wash your prints a few seconds into this stuff to get the effect you were probably after. Sometimes maybe more, other times less of course. 

Another lith, this time from a bit more recent neg. This had the same treatment done as the one above. Same paper as well.

I also mixed myself a couple of liters of Selenium toner as I got no idea where my last batch went. The thought was to use it to quite lightly tone a few prints I've got laying around this place, and they came out on the rather nice side I must say. No big change on the prints, just as I sort of like them. 
The strange thing happened when I decided to also throw two of them quite new lith prints into the same toner. Even though I've just told you the fact that my Emaks paper had just the look I was after that is not the whole truth to it. They were quite red a few of them prints, and I was looking for a colder tone to be honest. I did get the colder tone on one or two of them and it seems it depends a bit on the grade of over exposure you throw onto the paper. More exposure, more reddish results. So I had a couple of quite nice (by my standards anyway) lith prints, but they had a (to me) too strong red tone to them. So I decided to just throw them into the bath of Selenium toner just to see how ugly they could get when the Selenium had added it's own sort of red or violet(ish) tones to them. I would have really liked to see the expression on my own face when nothing like that happened at all, and the prints suddenly turned more or less straight into how I wanted them to look in the beginning. The red tones sort of washed away just to reveal the colder tones and the charcoal grey underneath. 

And finally a different version of the print above. This one did not get the Selenium treatment as I sort of liked the way it came out of the developer. Strange thing is that this was the only one looking like this. The other ones came out quite brown/earth red. The pixelated snap lies a bit, but that's just the way it is with them things anyway.

That's it for today, I think. I will let these prints dry and settle in a bit and take a better look at them tomorrow morning. When I get my new enlarger bulb some time tomorrow or Wednesday I will go inside the dark place again to see if I'm able to make a rather large lith print. I need to find out, because I need to make prints to hang on a wall later this summer as you might know. It's going to be a wall full of masterpieces, as you probably understand already... 

A few thoughts from over here

From the westerly side of that rather big Atlantic Ocean I give you a few words as we finally hit the shores of Trinidad & Tobago a few days ago. We didn't literary hit the shore mind, as big ships are not allowed to do that. At least we are finally here, preparing ourselves for the next job coming up.
It's a rather warm climate over here in the caribbean area, but I guess you've heard about that already from somebody else but me.

The Ona lighthouse, my nearby neighbour out there on the island. I never get tired of looking at that thing, actually. Or so it seems, anyway.

Two more days at work for now, and then you'll have me on the plane to get home to shuffle some of all that recent fallen snow from one end of the garden over to the other. You know the deal, I guess... good thing I still got some power in these arms and legs as there always seems to be something that needs to be carried, lifted, shuffled, repaired and what have we.

One of my friends posted a question a couple of days ago about something like "how many of you out there have experienced a memory card breakdown and lost pictures because of it" sort of thing. I threw in my reply, without having to even mention the word "film" once throughout my "article" this morning, and the comment section of that particular post has been totally dead ever since. It's painful, I know, to have someone telling you that loosing a couple of hundred or thousand snaps from a broken memory card is actually the smallest of problem you're facing being a dedicated pixel collector. None of your pictures will exist to see the light of day as your grand-grand children grows up given the world continuing on the same path as today anyway. At least not unless all your descendants will be growing up being super humans of some sort. One lazy, or unlucky for that sake bloke somewhere down the line is enough, and it will all be lost for all eternity. It's going to be a lot of work and hassle to take care of all them hard drives in the years to come, believe me! 
Me...? Oh, I just file them negs inside ring binders and more or less forget them. They will be there for anyone being able to shine a light through them to make real pictures at some point, should they feel like. Unless the house burns down, of course. Or some other disaster strikes... But them hard drives, no way they will survive anything. Not even themselves and/or their own language, as in not too many years from now there will be no machine still in production able to read them things anyway.

The Watch Crow of Glasgow (or wherever...)

Nuff said for today, I guess. I'm off for a short stroll on deck in at least 25 deg. heat or something like that, before throwing myself into bed. It takes time to get used to walking outside in the dark realizing the temperature is still higher than on the brightest summer mid-day back home.
Really looking forward to go home and pick up my wee project again. There will be a few days of work coming up when I get there, but I'll try to keep you sort of informed as I'm moving along. At least there's some sort of plan starting to manifest itself... which is good, I hope.

Thoughts from the sea

It's a rather dull place, the center of The Atlantic Ocean. Nothing to see at all. Not only for a day or two, but for two full weeks in a row. There was one ship passing us about five days ago according to rumors from the bridge, but nobody could actually see it as it passed something like 12 nautical miles north of us. And then it was in the middle of the pinch black night as well, of course. 
Oh, and one of the officers on the bridge spotted a couple of whales playing around the surface a few days ago, but that's it!
I've been downstairs in the engine room most of the time anyway, so I don't actually care too much about what they see or don't see up there. 
Got to say I'm looking forward to come over to the other side of the sea now. One week to go, and we'll be there, they keep on telling us. That's only if the navigators has a clue about where we are, I guess. Wouldn't hold my breath...

This was not a dull place, speaking from the heart. I'm not sure exactly where it was, but at least I know it was in the London area last summer. Busy as heck, it was. Trains and things, you know. And plentiful of people as well. I sort of like some of the lines in this one, but I seem to remember it looked better through the viewfinder of that old rangefinder than the final result turned out to be. That has happened to me before as well... just saying.

I'm really looking forward to get back home this time. Got a bunch of rolls inside the darkroom waiting to get sloshed around in some sort of developer, and hopefully I will have one or two rolls from this trip to go along with them as well. 
I might even get some time for printing, and to open up my rather fresh box of Lith developer to see if I can get something good out of a few old papers I got lingering around the place. 
Has anyone reading this thing ever tried the Emaks paper K883 in Lith? I got some of that sort, so I'm hoping the lith process will do something nice on it. 
Actually, it has to be good as I have already booked this wall to hang a few prints for one month inside the library in my hometown, and I got a plan for the first time in quite a while. It just have to work, as you might understand.

Curious Engineers, and a few dancers...

We're on a ship just now, as you've heard lots of times already. On board a ship you'll have staff and officers on the bridge, and a few in the engine department. They seem to have different brains, the two species. At least their brains seem to work very different to each other. 
I've been walking around with an old camera the last few days when time has allowed me to, and the reaction from the guys upstairs is very different to the things happening down there where all the action is. 
Upstairs it's like they couldn't care less, while downstairs you can't put that thing down until the boys throw themselves over whatever camera you carry, and start wondering how everything works, what the mechanics inside might look like, and stuff like that... you know. Engineers...

Something I did a while ago, as you might remember. I got loads of film back home in the need for a bath in some old Rodinal or whatever. Just give me a few weeks and I'll be back on  track. I promise! This was done on one of them rangefinders, if memory serves me right. With the 35mm attached, I suppose. Nice combo, by the way.

So there's been a few minutes of good talks around subjects like that down there lately, as the new motorman is young enough to never have either seen or at least not used a film camera. As you might remember I just got this old Nikkormat FT, and he's been lurking around that thing for a few days now. Shot a few frames and just had a good time, as you obviously do when sailing the blue and deep seas we sail at the moment.
Then I mentioned we might be able to actually take a few snaps and have them developed on board the next trip. They were all very interested and started wondering how that could be arranged, so I started playing with the thought about letting them build their own pinhole cameras just for the heck of it. Should not take too much time or effort to get that done, I would think. They are engineers, after all. Might even come up with some great and cool stuff for all we know. 
I'll try to bring some paper and a box of developer and fix on board, and let the guys produce some paper negs. from their own-made pinhole cameras. That would be fun, I suppose. 
They had no clue what a pinhole camera was, or did... so I used some time to explain the basics and now they seem to be even more intrigued by the whole thing. Lets hope it stays like that, at least until next trip on board. You never know, of course...

Another one of them dark light snaps done this evening. Something clearly happened here, but I'm not sure what it was. Probably someones flash threw some light around the room while my shutter was open. No too difficult as I was playing with times around the 1 second mark if I'm not very much wrong. 

Oh, and yes, we are making our way down south and another bit west. Passed the island of Madeira earlier today, and will probably make our turn a bit further towards west some time tomorrow afternoon. 
You'll soon understand the brains on them folks upstairs works a bit different to ours when you go up and have a quick look at their map from time to time... Sitting there in that chair watching the exact same thing over and over again for a full 12 hrs. watch will of course do something weird to your things below your top cover. And for 12 hrs. your next waypoint only comes a few millimeters closer. Nah... can't be made for all of us, that job!!
Anyway, the temperatures are really starting to rise now. I guess we're getting a bit closer to the 20 mark, so everything's fine over here. 

Nothing much new, like

It's been a while, again. I know. I'm sorry for that, of course.
You may blame either me, or the fact that there's been difficulties getting logged on from sea during the last few months, but that one issue seems to have been fixed. At least for now... so crossing fingers it will last!

Maybe I told you some time ago that the ship will be going over to Trinidad to do a few jobs over there, and then further south to Brazil and thereabouts. We're on our way as I write this little piece, having just crossed the Bay of Biscay during the last couple of days and will be just off the northern tip of Spain at the moment. This means we got plenty of salty water to cross yet before entering Port of Spain over in Trinidad in about a couple of weeks or so. 

An oldie from some time back. I know it's been posted before, but as my personal computer containing a few of my scannings are not accessable at the moment, this is what you get. The same goes for the other snaps as well... I remember this one was done on one of the Mamiya RZ67 cameras when testing some film a few years back. I screwed up the whole development, as usual...

As you also might know we just barely had time to move out to the tiny island of Ona before I had to go to work. It was great, since you ask. Absolutely fantastic, to tell the truth. I think I was inside the darkroom more or less every day, digging myself into the mysterious world of my new enlarger and a pile of more or less odd paper I got stacked up on my shelves. Up at around five in the morning to see the wife off with the ferry, then settled inside the darkroom from around six o'clock until around two or three in the afternoon. Didn't get anything special produced, of course, but it was great anyway. It's a tricky beast that new Durst enlarger!

The last weekend before I went to work we went away to spend a few days in our house on the mainland, but was due to head back out to the island after the weekend. Stupid move, very much!! 
Since we were having plans of all sorts for this weekend I did not see myself carrying a camera for those days, so I left them all out on the island since we were going back on Sunday evening anyway. 
Well... whaddayathink? Of course I had a call saying I had to go to work a couple of days early, so had to just pack and leave... without anything at all made for snappingstuff-up. 
No cameras, no film... no nothing.

I'm quite a sucker for lines and geometrical stuff at times, as you might know by now. This was an attempt to do something interesting one nice day in Scotland a few years back. I'm not sure if it works or not, but maybe on a rainy day?! Snapped through some M3 or M6 rangefinder with way too expensive glass mounted at the front.

Luckily enough we went through Bergen for work this time as we were carrying out maintenance, and basically making the ship ready for the long trip over to warmer waters. 
In Bergen you'll happen to find the only shop of this kind in Norway selling old cameras, film, lenses... so yes I just had to pay that cool Italian owner of the great shop a visit. For old times sake only, of course. 
I (believe it or not...) ended up with an old Nikkormat FT sporting a very well worn 50mm lens from the mid to late sixties. Got them cheap enough, which makes it somehow worth the trip into town. 
So why on earth a Nikkormat, you might ask? Well... it's cheap, and manual... and you can obviously use it to hit something hard should it be needed. Looking at the two cameras I had to choose between (very much driven by my tiny budget this day, not the selection of beauties inside the shop) was a selection of Nikkormat's and one of them darn Nikon EM things. Easy choice for me anyway. Besides, I got two of them EM cameras already, and none of the Nikkormat's. Up until now, of course.
The Nikkormat FT was originally released as more of a consumer end camera from Nikon back in the days around when I was born about 50 years ago. Still it was quite an expensive camera back then, and nothing most people (over here in Norway, anyway) would actually even consider buying for the household.
It got it's own quirks and oddities the Nikkormat, but seems to be about as solid (and at about the same weight) as a good old brick. My example are far from being in mint condition, but it still looks a lot better than Don McCullin's old Nikon F did after being shot...

Another one from days long gone. This one dates back to some time mid 90's, probably snapped with my (then still alive) Canon AE-1. I can tell, since that was the only camera I had with a wide angle lens back in those days. Got it cheap from a friend, I vaguely remember. 

Oh... and then there was this girl advertising her Diana F+ camera with all sorts of extras, which I also bought. She was living just around the corner from where the ship was laid up, so that was just a short walk away. Got the whole bunch of equipment for NOK 100,- which will equal something like a tenner over there in the British sector of the North Sea. Not bad... but then again they're actually worth nothing much, them Diana cameras. I got a few of those, so I should know!

A rather grainy and grimy one snapped in the Bay of Kirkwall in Orkney some years back. I remember there was weather coming in, as it usually did around that place. I simply loved the light over there. Not all the time, but most of the time.

Jumping back to the Nikkormat it seems to be working sort of great. At least it does so after giving the old shutter some good exercise

as it was acting quite a bit sticky in the beginning. It seems to get the job done, and I'm not asking for anything more to tell you the truth. The Italian dude made all sorts of woodoo-like stuff with it before he sent me away with the thing as well, so it should last for a while I presume. I once bought my Rolleiflex from the same guy. That one still works as well, so he's obviously a great repair man after all. I know he fixes German Rangefinders and things like that, so he's probably good at what he's doing. 

Great guy, the Italian!

The boat on the slipway in Kirkwall, Orkney. I remember snapping this one with the Rolleiflex in more or less pinch black darkness. I think there's something like a half an hour worth of shutter time in there, or at least something like that. I remember resting the camera on some pallet or whatever, keeping pressing the shutter until my fingers couldn't take it anymore. Could very well do with another half an hour, but this is what you get when you don't bring a simple cable release in your pockets when walking away with a camera into the darkness...