Sorry, Thor! Also: Life.

Dear Internet Spiders That Read My Blog,

I failed today. I was doing so well, and then bam. Failure. I got distracted today, didn't have a blog lined up and by the time I remembered today was Thursday... Thursday became Friday. So, this is the first time I've missed by Blog for Thor. Probably going to get struck by lightning or something. Darn. Oh well, maybe he'll forgive me if I blog before I go to bed. It's still "Thursday" if I haven't been to sleep yet, right? Right. It's just really late Thursday night.

So lets level, Internet Spiders. This hasn't been a great time lately.

A bunch of workshops and classes that I'd like to run don't have enough interest to get off the ground. I don't know anything about promoting anything. I'm terrible at social media, and worse at, uh, whatever the real-life equivalent of that is. Society, I guess. Yeah, bad at that. I don't really know anything about raising awareness of art courses and getting people excited about them and willing to pay money to learn things. That probably makes me a terrible teacher, but maybe I'll be lucky and it just makes me a terrible promoter.

Some of my recent experiments have come out crap. I already talked about how I managed to burn the butts off some of my prints with a dry-mount press. Then instead of fixing the problem, I just tried again and got more burnt prints. So that actually was kinda depressing, even if I made sure to use prints I wasn't a big fan of.

I tried getting some chlorophyll prints to work, but apparently chose the wrong kind of leaf? I had a negative on this leaf for three days and it shows almost no fading at all. It did manage to impress the faint outline of a rectangle on the leaf, meaning that now when I want to use that leaf for a lumen print, it has a ghostly rectangle on it. I don't like that. I'm gunna have to get a new leaf, which is a bummer cause it's a gorgeous leaf.

A recent batch of lumen test prints ran into issues when it decided to go all murky and cloudy in the middle of my exposures and stay that way for the rest of the day, and then rain the next morning. Even some of my expensive collodio paper was out getting tested and came back iffy. There was so little sunlight that even a 14-hour exposure (full afternoon and full morning) shows less detail and development than some 4-hour exposures I've done on sunny days. That's useful data, I suppose, but not really encouraging results.

With autumn finally arriving, there's going to be less and less sun. Not to mention less heat and humidity. Attempting to print cyanotypes or anthotypes during the winter has always been a losing proposition for me, since I don't have an indoor UV unit to do the cyanotypes and the exposure times for anthotypes can jump up to a month or more. Hopefully I can keep working on lumen prints, I'll just have to take into account the weather conditions more carefully.

Not everything has been bad. It's almost time to send in applications for graduate school, and I'm excited about that. I did get some very useful results on my latest experiments with Kodak Polycontrast IV RC paper. Not very interesting results (the paper is kinda boring), but useful ones. Next semester I get a third course to teach at the university. Not only does that mean more money, but it's a whole new challenge and I'll get to work with photo majors for a change.

So, you know, life. Challenges, failures, successes and progress. I'm going to keep blogging for Thor (seriously, I won't miss next week!) and I'm going to keep working on my experiments and notes. I'm going to keep teaching as often as people will pay me to do it, and keep looking for new places and new people that want to learn.



Incidentally, if you want to pay cashy money to learn esoteric and archaic photo-reactive image-making techniques, let me know.