Mount Holyoke College

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Earlier this week I spent some time at a rental darkroom downtown. It was the first time I had printed in a conventional darkroom in over a year, which is either a sign of the times or of my laziness (I’m not sure which.)

In any case, the usual course of events unfolded like clockwork — I spent two hours of my three-hour reservation making contact sheets from about 30 rolls of film, got over-excited and identified about a dozen enlargement-worthy images, started on the first, used way too much paper adjusting exposure and contrast, and finally made a 9×9″ print that turned out to be infested with dust. By this time I had 15 minutes of my reservation left, and wisely decided to give up rather than drive myself crazy with the air gun.

The image I tried so valiantly to print is this one. It was taken at Mount Holyoke College this summer with the Rolleiflex on my last roll of Arista.EDU Ultra 200 film. Scanning plus PS got me far closer to the image I had in my “mind’s eye” than chemical printing did, though the prints I did make had a wonderful luminosity.