Snapshots

I call this one, Bottle Cap. Did you guys grow up on Dad’s root beer? I did. This particular bottle cap is a promotional one. It has a 1959 penny encapsulated into the back of it.



CapCam

I’m not familiar with IBC Root Beer, Mr. Brew. Sounds good. Nothing beats a root beer float with some good-quality vanilla ice cream.

I did have some homemade sarsaparilla a few years ago at a renaissance fair. It was the best “root beer” I’ve ever had. Fantastic. Put that on your list of homebrew projects. Or mine.

Never tried it, but this one looks good:

I've never had sarsaparilla, though I wouldn't mind giving it a try.  Not going to happen here in my nursing home, I suspect.  I remember that it was frequently named as a drink on F Troop, though even as a kid I assumed that was really something else (beer, probably).  I think I first encountered it once in Stuart Little.

Here’s an update to the focus stacking experiment. I used the same five images as before (each focused, from front to back, on one particular plane of the coin). Assembly was done in Affinity Photo this time instead of Photoshop. The results were about the same. But I’ve since learned some techniques in Affinity Photo that allowed me to refine the results with further post-processing.

Via Affinity Photo:



Affinity Results

Via Photoshop:



Photoshop Results (from first attempt)

Old dog. A few new tricks.

Here's a blast from the past. Does anyone know what this is?

It's an old darkroom timer. You'd plug the enlarger (and a safe light) into it. Set the time for, say, 15 seconds. Hit the button on the lower right and the enlarger light would turn on for fifteen seconds and the overhead safe light (usually a dark red bulb) would go off. When the timer concluded, the enlarger light would shut off and the safe light would come on again.

The center dial glows in the dark. These things were made to survive a nuclear exchange. They're really rugged. And, as you might expect, this one still works. Dug out of the attic while sorting things that needed to be sorted. Great memories attached to this device. At one time I had my own darkroom where I developed and printed black and white. Digital photography has obviously changed things.

That's kool that you had some experience in the darkroom. It could be tedious but also rewarding. Back in the day, you could buy a whole brick of Plus-X film for a reasonable price and take a heck of a lot of photos.



This looks similar to the enlarger I had.

The development of 35mm film was somewhat temperature-sensitive, not adding to the fun, for sure. Typically I would prepare a bowl of 72 degree water for a bath, load the film on a reel that looks like this…



And put into a canister that looks like this…



There was other hardware such as this…





In theory, the plastic reel allowed you to “walk” the film onto the reel by moving one side and then the other. It was difficult to make work. Many would say the metal reels were even more difficult. But I tended to use the metal ones even though the learning curve was very steep. But once you got the feel for it (and that was by no means easy…some rolls of film just refused to wind onto the reels easily), there were advantages to the metal containers and reels. You could control the temperature better because the metal was a better heat conductor when you set it into a 72 degree water bath.

Once you actually got the damn film onto the reel, as you know, the rest was a piece of cake and perhaps the easiest part of the entire process from shutter to finished print.

There are many advantages to digital photography. Doing away with chemicals and the laborious process of developing film and the prints themselves (although, like you, it was fun to see things develop in the tray) was just one of the advantages of digital photography. Perhaps the most appreciated (by me) was that I no longer had to fight dust.

Dust in the film development process. Dust in hanging the film to dry. Dust on the negative sleeves. Dust on the lens. Dust on the paper. Dust on the finished film. Dust everywhere. It was a gigantic pain in the ass.

One must still keep one’s lens clean in digital photograph. And dust can certainly get on the camera sensor. But eradicating this one problem makes digital photography a relative breeze. And modern software makes it easy to shoot in glorious black-and-white if one wants to. There are many conversion methods (almost too many) to go from color to black-and-white. Most cameras will offer an in-camera mode for that.

I remember focus being a pain as well. As the enlarger bulb heated up the negative in the metal sleeve, the focus would change. There were just so many things to fiddle with. Even so, the process was relatively straightforward once you had the film developed. You’d want the solution in the trays to be about at the right temperature, but room temperature is all you really needed. You could, of course, adjust development time on-the-fly by eye.

And there was always one last chance to ruin your endeavor. Typically one would need to squeegee the finished (and quite wet) print in order to avoid water spots when it dried. The emulsion at this point was relatively soft so you had to be careful there was no dust (or especially grit) on the squeegee.

I used either a matte or gloss paper for prints. But there were other options as well. Gloss gave you (duh) a glossy look but it also was more high contrast. The blacks would really be black and the whites would really be white. Matte paper softened the contrast…which could work especially well for portraiture, for example.

If you fixed and washed everything properly, it’s likely that those prints/negs will be good for a hundred years or more. I was just scanning in some old negatives my father had shot when he was 19 years old and in college. They still look as good as the day that he likely developed them. He was an early photography enthusiast.

While going through some stuff from my mother’s estate, I found this next photo. Whether someone else shot this or he had it on a self-timer, I don’t know. But this would seem to be my father in January of 1950 in possibly his dorm at Olympic College. Things were quite Spartan back then. Making “safe space” snowflakes was not then the goal of college.



CollegeCam

Nineteen years old. Imagine that. From an even larger version of this scan, you can easily see that it reads “January 1950” on the calendar. And the document on the wall above it is some kind of speech, proclamation, or law from the Senate. It’s signed by John Adams, Vice President and President of the Senate. It’s possible it’s a reprint of the Bill of Rights that was passed in 1791.