Photo lab Saturday

I decided today was as good a day as any to catch up on my B/W photo stuff.  Thankfully my replacement film arrived yesterday in the mail.  I successfully turned my bathroom into a dark room so that I could load the film without ruining it this time.  Hooray!  After that I went out and shot at Cox Arboretum in Miamisburg.  Wonderful venue, beautiful scenery.  I was not the only one who thought so.  There had to have been about 20 people getting pictures taken, let alone taking pictures.  There were senior photos going on, family portraits, engagement pictures and anything else you could think of.  For about 10 minutes I tried to make sure that I was keeping my set up out of their shots, but then I realized that was impossible.  With that kind of venue comes the inherit risk of other people being in your shots, so I ignored the people and got my shots.

Came back to the lab to develop which was actually quite nice.  No one else was here, I had the lab all to myself.  It was nice and quiet and dark and soothing.  Developing 4x5 film in complete darkness is fairly meditative and I have to admit it was  refreshing.  I'm not sure how but it appears that all my film is a bit overexposed.  I find this odd because I always underexpose my film because its ISO 125 and my light meter is reading things at ISO100.  I know, a lot of photo shop talk, but for those of you who understand film speed you'll be right there with me.  I'll have to talk to my professor to see what I'm doing wrong.  I even tried to counteract the over exposure by under developing as much film as I could.  Didn't really make a difference.  We'll see.

And unfortunately just as I was finishing my last round of negatives people started showing up at the lab.  Thankfully I was finished with the dark dark room and only need the printing dark room, but my reverie has been broken.  It was peaceful and quiet and serene...and now my serenity is gone.  I'm going to try to make my contact sheets as fast as possible and then get the hell out.  I'm not angry yet, but I am already starting to get annoyed.  I hate being that hermit, but when the other people in the lab don't leave me alone and act as if their problems are my fault...yeah, I'm gonna get irritated.  I'm discovering that in the photo lab, too.  People just can't let you do anything in peace.  They always have to comment on something.  Even if its just telling you what you're doing.  That happened to me last week.  I was developing FB paper which is much more sensitive to developer than RC.  I'm watching the time so I know when to pull it out of the chemicals and not over develop.  As I'm doing this a complete stranger leans over my station and asks me "fiber or RC?"  I didn't want to be rude so I said "fiber".  She then replies with "make sure you don't leave it in that developer too long.  Fiber paper is prone to overdeveloping".  I responded with "yeah, I know, its got another minute left".  And then she kept talking about the dangers of overdeveloping and how I needed to avoid it.  What about me staring at a clock and quietly developing paper makes you think that I have no clue what I'm doing?!  I think that was rude.  She didn't stop there.  She followed me around the dark room for an hour telling me thins I was already doing and fixing.  It got to the point were I just had to leave and come back later.  Its ridiculous.  And lame.  People are ridiculous and lame.

I think I'll finish shooting my next assignment tomorrow so that I can develop next week.  Its a zone assignment so I don't really want to develop without consulting my professor first.  We are manipulating the amount of light we let into the camera in regards to the light meter and also the length of developing to get the best quality negative.  Lots of math and adjustments, I'd really hate to do it wrong.  Let's pray this awesome weather holds out just one more day!