while you were out. . .

I have to say, the Zero Image 45 is finally starting to grow on me. As is the idea of doing paper negatives. Admittedly, I had gotten off to a rough start with both. Part of my difficulty with the Zero Image, was, I think, the fact that I had been using a 120 rollback with it. I was having frame overlap issues when I'd use the 6x6 mask and there were also light-leak issues when I was using the rollback with the single [25mm] frame. A bit of adhesive-backed felt placed on the metal of the roll back and used as sealer helped this a bit.

As for the paper negative process, my problem was largely figuring out how to meter the paper. I've decided to go with 6-10 ISO until I find I need to adjust that. In terms of what this means for the Zero Image exposure, I've tended to go with 60 seconds when I'm outdoors and the sky is bright but without direct sun.

Times for indoors exposures have proven to be trickier to figure out. But I decided to set the camera up in my office the other day and just let it run while I was out teaching. The first exposure I took in/of the office (see first image in the sampling below) was started at 8:10 am and ended at 11:30. The second office exposure (above) was started at 11:30 and ended at about 2:08. Pretty cool to think (as I was teaching, in fact) that I was simultaneously teaching and taking photos and doing so in two completely different locations.

Speaking of things happening while one is out and about: Chris and I decided to go to hit the snowy, snowy park again yesterday--partly so that we could walk D, and partly to enable me to finish off the 4x5 paper (see images below) that had been loaded in the holders before the order of 4x5 film arrived. We ended up crossing paths [quite literally] with someone with a Contax rangefinder (and as it turns out, lots of darkroom and photography experience) so we ended up talking to him (asking him questions, really) for quite some time. A very, very cool connection to have made!