I haven't posted for a while because I was feeling crappy right after chemo #3, and after that, I've been keeping myself busy. I'm finally on the way to emptying out my apartment in Tokyo. Hopefully, that will happen in the next week or two. Since about a week before my last chemo, my hair started slowly falling out, but not enough that I wasn't going to have any any time soon, or even that anyone else would notice it probably. But it was annoying to shedding hair everywhere, ( although Ellie does it all the time) so I cut it all off.
I've also been working in my darkroom, but I don't have enough film to keep up with my printing, and I left my two favorite cameras in Japan, so I started playing with a 95 year old Kodak Brownie that we've had forever. The pictures it takes are in what was called the "postcard" format, about 4x6 inches, and no film company has made film for this format for a long time. So I took a piece of photo paper and cut in down to 4x6 and put it into the camera. This way I can make negatives on a sheet of paper, then contact print them onto another sheet of paper.
Playing around with this inspired a few more projects. First, I need a contact printing frame, which is for printing negatives directly onto a sheet of paper without using an enlarger. This is pretty simple to build once I find a piece of glass I can use. The second project is a view camera. Typically, they use either 4x5 or 10x12 inch film, and many are made fairly simply out of wood. To buy a new one often costs over $1000, but a fairly nice one can be built much cheaper. The first project, is one that many home builders don't make on their own, the bellows. By studying a few websites and the Brownie, I was able to make a small paper model. After a few attempts, I was able to make a symetrical tapering bellows, but it's rectangular rather than square as I'd hoped. It makes sense that it's rectangular, but I still need to figure out how to make it square.
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