a sunny day

It was clear and mild today, a great day to roll up the garage door and clean out the darkroom... something that's badly overdue, and a bit more urgent now that I'm thinking it's almost time to print again.

I've decided to order a new enlarger lens for medium format work, the existing one is showing traces of fungus between the elements and it's quite old anyway, there are better designs available now. So that will take a few days to arrive. Other things are more basic, the clock seems to have given it up, and that's easier to replace before I put the sink back against the wall. That one I'll take care of tomorrow.

Earlier in the day I pulled the plug for the last time on the HP piece of crap flatbed scanner, which sort of worked OK at first, but then required periodic reloading of the software... and now it's just turned evil, keeps reverting to default after every scan. No, I don't want to scan everything at 200 dpi, and I don't want to be bothered to change the settings for every single scan. A shame, the made good products once, but this is the third thing I've had problems with (actually the other two were owned by family members, but I'm the one who had to deal with them). Three strikes and you're out... no more HP products for me. Interestingly, the problems began during the reign of Carly Fiorina... now she's making sounds about running for U.S. Senate... nearly runs a company into the ground, now she wants to help run the country? No thanks, there are already enough issues.

The Canon flatbed that I've put in it's place is running flawlessly so far, and it takes up quite a bit less space as an added bonus. That's what I like, products that just work.

I'm currently in a mood to work with some older images, 10-year old stuff mostly, at the moment. And it occurs to me that if I wanted to, I could put the cameras away and keep plenty busy for quite a while just compiling things from all that older work.