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12/14/2003 Entry: "mad scramble and play"

Between the holiday shopping and wrapping and decorating and normal weekend chores, I'm amazed I found as much playtime as this weekend offered. Saturday saw a very nice turnout of eight LF addicts to shoot in the dim light of the Basilica. I had time for all of three shots with the view camera and two from the pinhole. Shouldn't have wasted my time with pinhole... even my hour long exposures were too short by a big margin. It's a magnificent old church, built back around the 1820s, with a wonderful domed ceiling, an ornate altar and a good sized pipe organ.

A couple of Van Dyke's from the view camera negs are drying now and may be scannable tomorrow, as will my attempt to add a layer of color gum bichromate to the digital negative cyanotype of the fish. I really need to spend some time tuning the curves of the neg to match the tonal range of the process. So much highlight detail's being lost with the wide range of the negative. I did run a test strip of a 20 step wedge to get some idea of where and what tweaking's in order, so future images should have a better range.