Valentine's Day

Windsurfer

It's Valentine's Day. We kind of celebrated that and Linda's birthday this weekend. Started with dinner at the Gideon Putnam on Friday night. Nice occasion - dancing. Meal was Ok if not the best ever, but we would probably do it again just because the overall package is nice.

On Saturday, we drove over to Williamstown to visit the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Wow - why haven't we dont that before? Amazing work - I think the thing I most enjoyed was a Gainsborough double portrait - a woman and male child. The eyes were amazingly lifelike. Got a couple of nice photographs in the show outside the gallery. Had lunch at the Waterside Grill before walking around the very small downtown area and then driving back.

Yesterday, Jeff invited his girlfirend for dinner.

Trying to decide what to do for a workshop this summer. I will be going to the Large Format Conference in Springfield in May, but I haven't decided what to do at Peters Valley. I'm pretty sure that I don't want to do Tillman's thing on platinum printing - I have nothing against platinum, but I need to focus on one thing, and my choice is silver printing. That leaves either Ernie's weekend or Chip's large format session. I think I will do Ernie's program (third time?) - doing Chip's program two years in a row doesn't seem to make sense, and with the LF conference in May, doing a LF workshop in August doesn't make a lot of sense.

Lots of things to do today - mail the Mini #3 portfolio, get stamps and mail the conference program to the Canadian addresses, go to the bank, get to Target to pick up some medicine, look at clock radios to replace the only junker that can't stay tuned to a station, etc. Weather is supposed to be ugly tonight.

I made this negative many years ago at Wellfleet on Cape Cod. The print is special, done using the partial solarization process described in Petersen's January 1977 issue. That process required the use of high contrast GRADED paper, Agfa Brovira #5 or #6, soaked in developer, before being exposed under the enlarger. There are two exposures - a brief, very bright exposure, followed by a pause while the initial image starts to appear, followed by a longer, less intense exposure, and then conventional development. The process resulted in some some tonal reversals and Mackie lines, but also put detail into bright hightlights and caused some wonderful silvery gray tones. Alas, it's no longer possible to find the paper needed to apply this technique.