Bigfoot

There's a streak of interest about Bigfoot in me. I've been curious about them for as long as I can remember, and during the time we lived in Portland, I was always on the lookout for the creature when out in the forests exploring.

There's a Bigfoot symposium in Idaho Falls this weekend, and I'm going to try to see if I can't attend at least a tiny portion of it. Seems like it would be a shame if I didn't go, since I'm in Rexburg for part of the summer and so close. It's also conveniently on the way to my parent's home for Father's Day.

Found some sweet animated .gif files of the Patterson-Gimlin film.

Dust

So I'm pretty discouraged this morning.

After such a productive day processing film and printing, I had very high hopes for my prints when I came back to the lab.

Heated up the dry-mount press and flattened out the prints w/out taking a very close look at them.

Got them all flat then made my final inspection. Print quality? Not bad. Subject matter? Interesting. Technical issues? Dust!

Dust? What? Crap! Dust!!!!! Dust everywhere. Little black specs on the print all through the sky. Which means (for the photographically challenged), that there was dust that had landed on the film at some point prior to making the exposure, cast a shadow on the film during the exposure, and ended up being recorded as a blank or clear spot on the processed film. When it's printed, those little blank areas of film let 100% of the light through and show up as black specs.

With the digital camera I can deal with dust. A click of the mouse and whoosh, it's gone.

With the 12x20 camera I have 240 square inches of film to worry about. 240 square inches that is, in essense, a giant dust magnet.

Dust can land on the film when you load it, could land on the film when you make your exposure, could be inside the camera and is dislodged when you operate it...floating around on the inside until you remove the darkslide exposing the film to the dust chamber that we call a camera.

I'm going to have to do some serious house-cleaning of the camera, film-holders and the black plastic bags that I carry the film holders around in. Other than that, there isn't really much I can do.

Dust is an issue in photography, sometimes you can deal with it sucessfully, sometimes not so much.

I'm going to ask the Ape-huggers what they do with dust. Hopefully they have some good suggestions.

Anyway, here's the photograph of the extinct Teton Dam Reservoir. Fortunately for you, the dust is smaller than the pixels on your monitor and you don't have to suffer with it.

*sigh*

Some technical data about the image:

Photographed with a Korona 12x20 Banquet camera, ca. 1930. Lens was a Voightlander 7 1/2 inch lens, ca. 1890. Film: FP4. The 7 inch lens doesn't quite cover 12x20, so the corners are vignetting, or are cut-off and go black. When you're focused on close objects, it isn't as pronounced as when you're focused on distant ones.