01/08/2025
Oh no! I forgot to update this until the new year. A lot has changed. First, some updates on ongoing work from earlier logs. Interestingly that borderless tissue pour I mentioned earlier was my first ever batch to develop fungus. It had a spindly white mold growing, not unlike a lens fungus but much faster — cleanup was unfortunate. I think I missed the isopropanol in the recipe, and I might look into adding thymol as well as a preservative. Carbon progress kind of paused after that for other reasons. The Symmar's Synchro-Compur broke itself again unfortunately. I spent a few stressful hours getting it back into shape, and I kind of did, but there's a misalignment at the bottom of the spring that engages the 1/400 speed that would require a deeper teardown than I've yet done. I want to wait until I have more tools to do this, since right now my lens spanner is a ruler and a screwdriver. The Triflow worked wonders though. The lubrication schedule in the manual on archive.org was very useful. Unfortunately between Sept. 16 and now the Seneca has fallen apart more. The joints are weaker, the bellows have more holes, and they're notably stiffer too. The focusing pinions have started skipping when turned with the knob, too, which is strange because the rear standard is still easily movable. I never did solve my hot edges beyond Use a Larger Tray, and unfortunately my only larger trays will absolutely scratch X-ray.
One of the biggest developments is that I do actually have one-sided sheet film I can develop in large trays now: Aerochrome 2443! It's infrared-capable and everything, makes passable false-color negatives and beautiful black-and-white negatives in HC-110. I'm not using it, though, beyond test images because I really want to sell it. I hear you can get good money for it, and I NEED money to be able to continue photography. I ran out, so I've been basically stalled for two months on all darkroom and most photographic work, just running a roll of Fomapan and a terrible 5x7 or two when I need a break. I'll gladly spend a few workdays in the dark cutting and fitting and shipping 1,750 sheets of this stuff in 4x5 if it means I can get a Linhof and a couple lenses and enough film and paper to keep me for the year at least, or a Nikon system for wildlife maybe.
The airshow was great! The Seneca was a veritable celebrity, and I got some nice enough images. They suffered from the usual problems, and the unusual problem of having to load my 1.5 working holders in the Virginia sun and getting fingerprints on the developed negatives. I'll display a 35mm image below, but link a larger collection with some notes here.
I'll finish that Oceana page sooner or later. After Oceana it was kind of a lull. I was running low on money, and more importantly my courses got more involved and I poured more time into those. I did do some work in digital — nothing too significant, but I had a good time taking moonlight shots with the 300mm. One of the most important things I'm hoping to get this year is a better tripod, though, and a gimbal and pan/tilt head. Ballheads are my forever enemy, especially cheap ones. If I ever get a ball-head again it'll be either $20 or geared. Either way, the Tamron performed admirably in moonlight, and handled complicated situations with ease. I hope to service it soon, basically everything that can break without affecting its functionality is broken with it so I'll have to get in there to make it actually reasonably enjoyable to use. The worst parts are the rubber focusing grip (falling off) and the dust all over the internal elements. It doesn't affect images much but it's really annoying when it does.
