Messing around with lost arts

It’s not a lost art. Not yet, anyway.

Got back from Montreal and decided the time had come to get down to working on some black-and-white photography. I haven’t shot any B&W in about five years, and having certain plans for this fall, I thought it might be a good idea to blow the dust and cobwebs off my memory of how to process this stuff, and especially of how to get decent scans of B&W negatives, a problem I’ve never really solved to my satisfaction.

The bottle of HC-110 I dug out of the basement had a uniform pink colour, as might be expected, so it was off to find new chemicals. My new bottle of HC-110 has an expiry date of November, 2006, but the colour looks good. (Rest assured, I apply a slightly higher level of care where food is concerned.)

To my surprise, I can’t get Tri-X Pan. The explanation is that the Kodak distributor is imposing minimum order quantities that can’t be met, so it’s Neopan 400 instead. Seems I’ll be switching to Ilford chemicals and Fuji film from here on in. It’s hard to be a creature of habit these days.

Now I just need a subject worth photographing.