A slice of St Giles

Getting up on a Monday is becoming the measure of the march of darkness into winter. How far through the showering and dressing I am before there's even the suggestion of some light in the sky. Soon I'll have forgotten about that and started measuring it by how close I get to work and then by how long I've been in work before the light appears. After than it becomes a measure of how long it is dark before I leave work. Cheery

Nothing happened today apart from putting some more film through the Ikon, which I'll need to go and process in a minute, and buying Edwyn Collins' album Losing Sleep. I kept meaning to buy the last one and never got round to it or maybe I was just put off by the boring book his missus wrote.

Anyhow. I've been trying for a while to get Silver Efex Pro to do something that looks like lith printing. Tim Rudman is the master of lith printing although he tends towards a very soft effect. More aggressive printing, letting the black darken and spread gets more like this. I'm not sure this is it but it's the closest I've come and I quite like it. Of course, being digital it has none of the fun of real lith printing, which is unpredictable, requiring the development to be watched like a hawk until the paper is snatched from the developer and plunged into the stop bath before the paper turns completely black. The nice thing is that each print is pretty much unique. Even if you time it the same, the developer has changed from the first print so the print is different. Digital reproduces exactly the same time after time. Lith: it's about the only thing that would get me back in a darkroom. Come to think of it, I have everything I need in the garage. Mind, it's cold down there.