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During the Covid Crisis, I'm bunkered down at home unable to use the college lab I manage. So I've been developing film in my films in the laundry room again with my trusty old JOBO tanks. School was wrapping up and a student found a holder with film in them and I offered to process. I can process 12 sheets at a time with my Jobo and I'm lazy, so I try to fill it and use semi-stand. So I took her two  sheets and found a few of mine to process and made a few to at least get close to the capacity of the tank. Also, recently I "repaired" my old Sakai (Toyo) half plate camera that was converted to 4x5. My high school teacher, Vince Bernucci at Independence High School was kind enough to give this to me in the mid 1980's. At some point the ground glass got broken and recently it occurred to me that I had a transplantable one I could replace it with. The bellows was also all squished up, and I sort of managed to partially straighten that out. Unlike some of my camer

I'm 50 years old at the time of writing this. I grew up with analog photography being the only option. In the mid 1980's when and where I attended Independence High School in San Jose California I had a fantastic photo teacher: Mr Bernucci. At some point he just gave me a couple of way outdated boxes of Kodak Medalist single weight photo paper. The paper expired in 1972, so obviously it was made a few years earlier. Funny thing is that this paper was likely made about when I was born. The big yellow boxes once held 500 sheets each. One box was grade 2, the other grade 3. At some point my dad Hans was looking for a photo paper box to store my grandfather Milton (Hal) Halberstadt's ashes. Al Weber was doing a memorial workshop to honor my grandfather. So I consolodated the two boxes of Medalist paper into the same box face-to-face so I could know one stack is different than the other and gave a box to my dad. My dad would set up a folding chair and put the medalist b

ORWO Neopan Film Data Sheet Long ago, in a galaxy far away- well actually it was 1987 in what was the German Democratic Republic, I began a love affair, albeit with a film. Traveling on a day visa for the first time to the GDR with my friend Christof and his sister, I paid the DM5 for a day visa and exchanged the mandatory DM20 for the local currency, Mark der DDR. Though M20 was roughly worth US$8 it was hard to spend. The stereotypes of the East Block were that of empty shops and long lines. But at least in the capital of the GDR, neither of those issues were apparent. What was apparent, was that the prices of things were drastically different. Many of the day-to-day things that consumers would want were much less expensive. I ate and drank far more than I should have. If I remember correctly, a beer at a sit down cafe on "the Alex" was M0,70 (ca. US$ 0.30) or so. I had perhaps the best ice-cream in my life from a street vendor for a few cents (and later again a