For you who are holding your breath until my next exciting installment, here is one of today’s outcomes. This one actually has some strength. I was pretty frustrated earlier today until I checked again in my book on alternative processes and got reminded to mix enough emulsion for the next size up when being a beginner. My earlier (expensive trash can material) prints today were mottled and streaky. The coating wasn’t getting onto the paper for good, even coverage. So I counted drops into the shot glass for a 5 x 7 print to do a 4 x 5 and things were much improved.You really hate to botch these prints because of the  cost and time consumed in finally being able to determine that a particular effort was in vain. I was about to ship my UV box back to Austin…

For a little background into this subject, I will copy and paste from one of my other blogs about sandlot baseball games during my middle childhood:

“If we were lucky, Jimmy Porter made an appearance as well. Mr. Porter had been a player in the Black Baseball League and had come to Carrollton in the 1940’s. He is another topic altogether, but I’ll touch on this here. He would come to the field and coach us some. I particularly remember a lesson on laying down a bunt. He would tell us about life and caution us on keeping our behavior in good order. Jimmy would pitch, but would always stand between the mound and second base for our safety’s sake since he was pitching the ball harder than we might be used to from the boys our age. I remember his bats. They were heavy and seemed as thick as tree trunks. He’d carry two or three around, gripping all of them with one hand, the bats protruding out over his right shoulder with his old glove fastened over the end of one. We were his ‘little friends’ and he has a peewee league field named after him today.” This is the man pictured here:

I took this picture in 1982, I believe, using a Nikon FE with a 55mm micro Nikkor attached. The film was Kodak Technical Pan and was shot at 25 ISO of all things. (It was the best sharpness solution for those of us who didn’t have a large format camera.) I have no idea how I got a sharp picture. I was pretty new at photography. He was sitting outside an old storage building facing the already set sun in the west. I asked him and his friend Ira if I could take their pictures. I did one of each man solo, then of the two of them. This is the only image I have to work with now.

I printed each of them an archival 11 x 14 and toned in Kodak Poly Toner. I put in frames to give them. When Mr Porter here died some few years later, someone got the print I gave him into the hands of the now long expired Dallas Times Herald. My picture showed up on the front cover of their weekly insert mini magazine. I found the print sometime later in an old historical house in Carrollton, Texas, where all this happened. It was upstairs as a part of their small museum. I’m not sure where it is today. It may be there. I’ll go look sometime.

Anyway, I’m glad to have made this my first Pt/Pl print I really like and to have learned how to do better in the future!