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.