It has been a very long time since I last posted on the site.  This is due largely to life -- and COVID -- getting in the way, but it is also reflects a refocusing of the medium I shoot to film rather than digital.  Right before COVID I took a class on film developing and printing, and became captivated by the process of creating my own negatives and prints.  After building out a space in my basement for a darkroom I dove in to testing black and white film stocks, film developers and print developers.  After settling on formulations that worked for me --  more on all that later -- I decided to delve into large format photography with a 4x5 field camera.  Even though I love black and white, I decided to take a stab at developing color film stocks to capture images I thought told a story that depended on the colors.  This led to a search for the right hardware to make scans of negatives which in turn I could print using my ink jet printer (making wet color prints is beyond reach for me).   That has been a journey that deserves its own blog post.  As I became more comfortable with all these processes, I turned my attention to creating prints using the traditional wet print processes.  Rather than making prints of lots of images, I started to select images that I thought were special and devote lots of time to making a really good print.  I cannot say exactly when it happened,  but one day I realized that it was okay to shoot an entire roll and only convert a few images to great prints.  The field camera experience has also been a huge help in spending more time on reading the light and making compositions contemplatively rather than just blasting away.  I now try to think before I shoot, and only shoot what I think might make a great print.  I know this all sounds very old school, but it is a huge source of pleasure for me and that is good enough for me.  I still do a lot of family shooting -- grandkids and all that! -- but that is very private and will not end up on the site unless it is extraordinary and anonymous.  It is hard to condense nearly five years of evolution in what I do to a brief post, but I plan to break all this down to address each step more granularly.  More later!