Ile du Guesclin

Another post going back to the roots. I’m excited about shooting digitally, making negatives from those files, then printing in cyanotype, gum bichromate, and the like. Earlier this month I had an intro to some of these older, now deemed “alternative” processes, and starting today have a weekly slot in a collective darkroom 10 minutes from my flat. Wednesdays my perfume will be fixateur

As excited as I was this morning, I found myself questioning the whole process (“I could do this in five minutes in Photoshop, is this really worth my time?” and so on…) Then a magical error happened. I had taken out the negative to blow off some dust, and when I put it back, I unknowingly set it up on the adjacent frame, and one I hadn’t chosen to print. So when I exposed the paper as before, I got a completely different result. Obviously. At first, I didn’t understand what happened, but loved the unexpected result. This simple, beautiful accident reminded me one of the reasons why I was there, and why I still love shooting film.

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