More Printing for Apparitions

On March 25th I spent about five hours in the darkroom, printing yet more negatives for the Apparitions project.  This followed a partial day in the darkroom making unsharp masks.  Normally I print three or four negatives in a darkroom session, and usually make two or three copies of each print.  This time around things went remarkably well, and I ended up printing five negatives.

I think that I now have something like 27 negatives printed for Apparitions.  And there are about ten more that I would like to get around to.  I just need to see what the image looks like as a big print, before I can finalize my selection.  Small little details are often not obvious until the negative is printed to exhibition size.  All of my exhibition prints are 16" x 20".  

I will only be exhibiting 16 of these prints in the show.  Once they are all done I will make my final decision as to which to include.  This will also take into account the prints of my colleague Arturo.  We went out shooting together many times over the last five years of working on this project.  So we have similar images from some of these locations.  We need to avoid duplication, and select the absolute strongest images.  Later, when it comes time to publish out book, we will include significantly more images and at that point there can be a little similarity.

These are all just phone snapshots of the prints in a holding tray of water, as I worked on them.  The first one is some lubricators at the Turner Valley Gas Plant, taken during a private tour of the site in 2023.  The next one is some nails in the wall of the company store at Brazeau Collieries Historic Site in Nordegg.  Again I was on a private tour in 2024 when this photograph was taken.  Its not clearly visible in the snapshot, but there is a number written on the wallpaper above each nail... not sure what they were for...?

After that is a shot of an old abandoned boat on Vancouver Island, taken during our visit there in October of 2023.  This is followed by some pilings, also on Vancouver Island, that were once part of a coal loading dock.  And finally another shot from the tour of Brazeau Collieries.  This one shows a bunch of writing on the wall of the hoist house, noting weather conditions and the date the mine closed, in 1955.