Waverly Street, Philadelphia
I haven’t been doing much urban landscape photography lately, so a quick trip to Philadelphia seemed to be a good opportunity to take my camera to the streets and shoot a roll or two. I am not very familiar with Philadelphia, but after walking the streets for a few hours I seemed to get the hang of it and found quite a few spots I liked. I shot most of a roll in this little alley near Rittenhouse Square.
Unfortunately I continue to be plagued by technical difficulties and much of this roll is in very bad shape. March hasn’t been a very good month for me, photographically speaking. In this case, as has been the case with my last few rolls of film, I have been experiencing very uneven development, with bubbles or patches of light and dark showing up on the left edge of the photographs. I’ve never had this problem before, but since it’s always on the left side I suspected I wasn’t using enough developer or agitating enough. This time I used a larger tank, a different reel, added an extra 200 ml of developer, and agitated a bit more, but I’ve got the exact same problem. I think I’m going to shoot a couple of rolls of gray card and hit the darkroom tonight to figure this out.
If anyone wants to take a look at the symptoms, here’s a version of this photo before I fixed the sky. As you can see, I did a rough job of covering it up because I liked this image enough to post it to the web… unfortunately, it will never look good enough to print. If you have any ideas as to the cause of my developer troubles, please drop a line in the comments.
Just as an update for anyone who’s been following the Taking a Picture series, I’m afraid I won’t have a new post on that topic for a little while. I am entirely unhappy with the contact sheet I posted last week and I’m considering using a pre-existing photograph for the scanning and printing examples. I’m not sure yet if that spoils the intention of the project—to follow the process from start to finish… on the other hand, with my luck, it will be months before I have any new photographs I’m sufficiently happy enough with to dedicate that much time and energy to.
March 29, 2008