I recently had a physical and discovered that my thyroid functioning is somewhat sub par. One result of that can be difficulty concentrating (I would say staying focused, but being a photographer and all…), and perhaps some memory lapses. I prefer to think of it as the absent-mindedness of a genius. In any case, the fix is in, the drugs are being taken each morning, and all will be peachy in short order, I’m assured.

So, I will blame what happened to me in the darkroom a few days ago (I think, or was it this morning?) on this totally biological abnormality and not on my being deficient in general intelligence. I walked in to develop the film that contained four of these images and grabbed the paper developer, Ilford Multigrade Developer instead of the Kodak D-76 that had been my original goal. I had put the paper dev into collapsible plastic containers to keep out air with its deleterious properties and had the D-76 on the floor in a gallon container by the refrigerator.

Normally, for paper, the paper dev is diluted 1:9. I used it on the poor rolls of film at 1:1 for one of the rolls, and at FULL STOCK STRENGTH for the other. That is the roll you see here. Needless to say, result was catastrophic. They were what we called in the olden days, “Bullet proof” in the highlights. So, I had to use grade 00 contrast filtration and do a lot of tricky burning and dodging to get what you see here from the scanned prints. The face particularly required a full minute of burning in. The overall exposure times ran into 2 – 3 minutes at f4 on the enlarging lens.

I hope I don’t do this again.

This, by the way, is my lovely wife, Christy. Camera was Nikon FM2/T with good old 105 f1.8 manual focus Nikkor lens on it. Film was Fuji Neopan Acros 100 shot at that rated ISO.