I love the smell of fixer in the morning, it smells like photography!

New Adventures in Photography, Part I of X

I took my first photography class in my sophomore year back in '77, I was kicked out of it at the semester break. :p My first camera was a Yashica MAT-124G, a wonderful camera that used 120 roll film, producing a negative that was 2.25" square (6x6cm), worked all summer mowing lawns to raise the $150 or so to buy it. Because the negative was so much larger than 35mm (24x36mm), it produced fantastic enlargements as you didn't have to magnify the image as much.

Many cameras have come and gone over the years, someday I might work up the nerve to try and come up with a count. Come to think of it, not entirely unlike my gun collection, that also had a lot of mobility. Currently I shoot Canon Eos, I have a Digital Rebel, which my lovely wife gave to me about a year ago, and two 35mm bodies, a 630 and an Elan. Add to that a Canon flash and a half dozen lenses or so, and you have a satisfactory system. I also have a Kodak 4 megapixel camera, an older Yashica 6x6, and a 4x5 press camera like from the old movies, complete with flash gun. (Trivia point: the original lightsabers in Star Wars 4: A New Hope were built from Speed Graphic flash handles). I can think of at least one additional camera lurking around here some place, a 35mm Canon rangefinder with a nice lens.

I love shooting, both cameras and guns. When I went through my period of extended unemployment, both were denied me as both are kind of costly in terms of supplies. Film isn't cheap, then add the processing cost to it. It adds up quickly, you're probably looking at $8-10 per roll. And that's color. Color is fine, but I really like working in black and white. They now make a b&w film that must be run through a color machine or equivalent color (C-41) process, but the thought, however convenient it may be, of going to Walmart to get my b&w film processed just doesn't sit well.

And the cost of setting up your own dark room? WOW! You're probably looking at $500 minimum on equipment and supplies, assuming you have a light-tight room and don't have to do extensive renovation to stop all light leaks. And if you don't have the facilities to dedicate to a permanent darkroom, then you'll have to make everything semi-portable (no matter how much you might want to argue the point, it ain't portable, just semi-). Then you're risking damage to your enlarger and everything else because you have to take it out of storage, unpack it, set it up, make sure it's working ok, do your work, take everything apart, repack it, put it back in storage. It couldwould become quite a hassle.

And then let's talk about chemicals. Color chemistry is nasty stuff. First, you probably can't just dump it down the sewer drain (legally). Second, once mixed, it has both a timed life and a print life, i.e. it can process X number of 8x10 prints before it is exhausted. It isn't cheap, and if you don't exhaust the print life before the chemicals expire, your cost per print just went up.

Black and white chemicals aren't quite so bad, but they do require special handling consideration.

So unless you're a VERY serious amateur or semi-pro photographer, a home darkroom really isn't that viable.


CONTINUING....

YAWC

Yet Another Web Comic: The Order of the Stick. Very primative art style, basically enhanced stick figures doing D&D delving. I've been working my way through the considerable archives for a while now, it's slow going because each comic is quite large. But this one made me laugh out loud and thus deserves an early mention. Thanks to greyweirdo or apostate_96 or whoever who recently mentioned OOTS in their blog.


You know, after I posted this and re-read the strip, I just had to add a comment. I had a great time last week in City of Heroes. I was running my Controller, Mystii, in a group. A controller is a poor character for solo play, but in a good group, they can really rock. Well, we had quite a unique group: three controllers and one blaster. A controller can also buy healing powers, and we were sufficiently high level that we all had powers that affected large groups of bad guys. We were running around, the four of us, attacking groups of a dozen or more and just absolutely kicking ass. Us controllers would immobilize the baddies, frequently squeezing them in rock, the blaster would blast targets of opportunity, and the controllers would heal whoever needed it.

It was majorly cool. So that last 'Go Team Cleric!' struck a late-chiming chord.

I really hope to do a controller run again some time.