Week 39: Car Show and Wet printing

I have a few other rolls in the development hopper from previous weeks, but this particular one was used in a beginning darkroom class from last night where I got to do a contact sheet and wet print for the first time.  Fun!  I’ve been developing film for about a year and half, so that part of class was just a refresher, though they also covered using metal reels, so I got to practice loading them.  The class was held at a local community darkroom, PhotoSynthesis, which is a great resource (not sure how I only discovered it recently).  Decided to join up and will hopefully be doing more traditional wet printing there in the last quarter of this year’s project.

So, more cars.  This was at a usually largish car show held in my city, but we had spits of rain and I think that kept a number of people away.  I brought my old BMW and found a few other German cars at the show as subjects.  I also shot a color roll, but will probably just add that to my flickr once I get it developed.

I brought my Fujica GW690 which is quickly becoming one of my favorite cameras.  It is so portable for such a large format (120, 6×9) and the negatives always make me go “Ooooh, aaaah” when I pull them out of the developing tank.  I’m thinking if I do this project again next year, I might just choose to shoot this one camera.  Anyway, enough gushing about the camera.  The film is one I haven’t used before, but I like the results and considering the price it seems a great option going forward.  Arista.EDU Ultra 100, developed in whatever developer the community darkroom has, about 7.5 minutes.

I forget the exact paper we used for the contact sheet and print (Ilford RC, a pearl finish, but not sure the specifics).  I believe the school has Dektol for the paper developing, and unlike film developing it really seems magical.  Plop the paper in the tray, do some gentle agitation, and the image(s) quickly come up on the paper.  So cool!  Obviously there is a ton to learn about this aspect of traditional film/print making, but I now have a place to do so without the full expense of setting up my own darkroom.

First Contact Sheet

And my first print.  I think the scan is a little darker than the actual print, but I didn’t bother to adjust anything.  BTW this is a very very rare car, an NSU Spider with a wankel (rotary) engine.  The owner told me he knows of only 33 still on the road in the USA, and they only made 1200 worldwide.  NSU eventually merged with Audi.

5×7 Print

I also scanned the negatives like I usually do, and picked my favs below.  I cropped a few of these, rotated, etc, but nothing major.

 

Wankel Engine

Porsche 356

Porsche 356