That's More Like It!

I think I'm going to get a tattoo on my wrist that says something like "only shoot with film or paper you really love", catchy huh? It may not sound like much, but lately I'm realizing it's quite a profound statement.

Lately I've been shooting with Fomapan 400, I definitely don't hate Fomapan, but I don't love it much either. Sometimes it's a little difficult for me to find the motivation to shoot, with it loaded in my camera. Coincidentally, I've had a horrendous run of bad luck with Fomapan lately. My little Holga 135 ate two rolls (or chewed them up so badly that they weren't worth bothering with), I was really careful when loading it too, as I was worried that it could happen with this camera.

Today, I pull developed a roll in the wrong developer, it basically didn't work at all. Like an idiot, I have two very different developers in basically the same kind of bottle. Why bother with reading labels?

Misfortune aside, I do feel much more motivated to get out and photograph when I'm shooting a film or paper that I'm really fond of. Case in point, this morning I found a small packet of my all time favorite paper for lumen photographs, the wonderful, glorius Kodak IV! I actually have quite a bit of it, but not cut to size. Stop yelling, I've been busy lately!

Now this is the paper! Exposures taken with this are (in my mind) the Platonic ideal of what a lumen photo should look like. I could go on and on, but you've probably heard it before.

In any case, these were taken with two different Cadobo Cams, the first is a hybrid Cadobo camera in that it uses a 50mm plastic lens from Jorge Otero's fabulous Lumenbox, I chose this camera for the flower photos, because it's the closest focusing (even though it has a super shallow depth of field) of all my Cadobo cameras. The first three shots were taken with this camera.

The other camera is a plain old vanilla Cadobo cam with my standard 63mm plano-convex lens, I chose it for the last photo for it's deeper depth of field. Do I need a different Cadobo camera for each shot now?

Both cameras were wearing my highly sophisticated candy wrapper magenta filter.

Exposures varied from 1.5 hrs to over 2hrs on well soaked paper. Even then, I noticed a little burning in the corners of the papers. Cadobo users beware! Has the Sun all of a sudden gotten stronger? I don't recall this film burning issue being a thing before, or am I that oblivious? Hmmm.