Ever since April came and went I have been yearning for September. I tend not to make too many images during the summer months, I do make some but not to the same extent. Anyway, tidying my workshop up ready to re-erect my temporary dark room was a job I had been putting off for some weeks but now we have had a little taster of the light we should have been getting for this month I got stuck in this morning.
I am not a tidy person, just ask Mrs O, but then I dare not comment on her sewing and knitting space. I find it a tad difficult to be creative in a sterile environment but there comes a time when needs must and a bin beckons.

This blow up dark room I have is quite handy but once up I am loathe to take it down too often as the connecting rods have steel thread that mate into aluminum blocks – not a good combo and that combined with an error when I first erected it knackered the threads. An expensive mistake but I now have a new exoskeleton for it and a tube of copper grease to use this time around. It was this that spurred me on to clean up the place. Just like my desk, I could not see the counter top in the workshop for picture hanging ephemera and shed loads of tester pots from when I did up Mrs O’s sanctuary over two years ago.

Now this is a thing. Getting rid of waste or left over paint is impossible these days even with water-based paint. The local council used to provide special bins at a controlled site where one could take these pots but no longer. They can be collected from someone near Kings Lynn – quite close to Ipswich but the other method is to pour the paint out into trays and let it dry. This is what I tried this morning. Hell might freeze over before this dries however.

Seeing the content of these pots mix in with each other made me grab a stick and a camera plus tripod and autumn cleaning fell by the wayside. The paint was in a constant state of flux and I was using quite low shutter speeds but what I saw looked like Hubble pictures. OK no dazzling galaxies, but the effect was quite pleasing.

Yes, I did make enough space for the dark room. I just need to let this paint dry now. Cannot afford to tread in it. Also, a shipping order of Kodak Portra 5×4 now beckons for the extended shooting of Edgelands.