Seconds and Sleepers

With the 8x10 project eating up much of my free time I haven't been doing a lot of shooting this week. Actually aside from documenting the project I really haven't done any. Tonight as I wait for the next coat of urethane to dry it occurs to me that there are a lot of photos taken over this summer passed (or almost passed at any rate) that haven't received the attention they deserve. Usually I'm all over it the moment the negatives are dry enough to get on the scanner, but for one reason or another a few deserving shots get no more than a preliminary low-res scan (soon to be replaced by an actual contact sheet, but more about that another day) then languish in a negative sleeve tucked away in a binder on my shelf.

Most often this happens when I get infatuated with another shot on the same roll. Such was the case with the photo above of my son Brennan looking... well I'm not sure how he looks to you but he was really just bored. (Teenagers, what  do you expect?) It's a nice composition and I just love the sky here. It happened to be taken on the same roll of film on which one of my favourite exposures from this past summer was on. And so it was that it sat virtually unnoticed for nearly two months, and might have sat even longer if I'd been careful to buy a faster drying wood finish.

This one sat even longer before I really took much notice of it. It was taken one wonderfully foggy morning last spring. I went through several rolls that morning alone and spent the rest of the day developing film. Unsurprisingly there were many keepers from that lot. If I was granted the power to control the weather for one hour while I was out with a camera you can bet I'd make it foggy.

I liked this shot back then, enough to have made a good scan of it, but it didn't find a spot among the half dozen or so from that day I became keen to share. It was a bit of a sleeper. Maybe I needed to live with it a while. Or maybe I just needed enough time to pass that I could regard it as a singular image rather than in the context of one of the shots I took that morning. Whatever it was, it was just last week that I stopped on this image while looking for something else and asked myself why this one has never made its way into the wider world. Granted, at this point this means no more for me than an inclusion in my Flickr gallery, a post on Tumblr, and now a mention here. Due in part to a few spots of bad luck I'm still not in a position to make any kind of print, at least any kind that would be worth showing. Things are again moving on that front however. I hope to again have the capacity for making prints, real silver gelatin darkroom prints, over the next few months. I wonder how that will change things. Making a good print is a bigger commitment than posting a scanned negative somewhere. It will probably be even harder for these seconds and sleepers to make it on to the printing easel. On the other hand the internet is still there and it will remain just as easy to get them out into the world in their electronic incarnation. There are worse fates a good image can suffer I suppose.