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this afternoon, i had about 40 minutes to burn, well, roast ... before picking the kids up from their last day
of school for the year. i grabbed the tin and hot plate and green beans and roasted a 4 handfuls of coffee.
slow roasted for a lot of it, the first group was small, about 1 handful ... the beans went from green to brownish, to tan.
the oils came and went ... when they got black i poured them out ...
i put the rest of the green beans in the tin and stirred ...

i took a queue from billh but rather than call it
the generic i went for the varietal

i went for a handful of different lighting, slow film and fast
panf was purchased in 1996 but never used, plus x is expired as well ...

the coffee was roasted and re-roasted until it was black outside and in.
i'm not sure what it would be called ... it was kind of sooty from the pan

then it was ground ... part fine part extra fine, part medium, ...

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i boiled 4 cups of water at 9pm
i put coffee in the pestle 3 times
ground it by hand with a mortar
dumping it into the 4 cups.
it boiled, then sat for 2 hours ...

the coffee smelled kind of nice.
it wasn't the burnt rubber tire
i was warned about.

as the coffee rested and cooled
i took out the graflex and taped the 23 roll
back to it. i wasn't sure what film was in it
but there were 7 exposures so i used ...

i wish the makers of instant coffees weren't so tight-lipped
about the make up of their brew. i just was hoping
they would give me the ratio of robusta to arabica to
make my life a little easier. i hope to grind up the beans tonight
and i guess i'll shoot a short roll or two tomorrow to see what's-what.
but unfortunately all their information is top secret

i was thinking of a fine grind to extract as much coffee as possible,
but now i ...

No, it's not humidity. No, it's not finding the proper balance of pigment to gum. No, it's not the balance of pigment/gum to Ammonium Dichromate. All that stuff's easy. Relatively. The true bane is registering your negative(s), especially when trying to print a relatively darker layer over a relatively light layer. I was just working on an image where the under layer was Burnt Sienna, which in the real world translates into peachy-colored, fairly light pigment. Couple this with having a relatively ...