Saturday – A trip to Lacock Abbey and the Fox Talbot museum with the 10×8 and 4 negatives to shoot – sadly 3 big shadows on the images.
I ran a test on another fresh negative at home on Sunday morning and then went to Clevedon Pier as the day was grey and overcast – low contrast lighting which I was waiting for and 3 out of four shots here too with dark shadows.
I put a battery LED lamp inside the camera in the darkroom and went through the motions of adding the slide carrier, exposing the negative and replacing the dark slide to see if any light leaked out. On the second attempt yes – a light leak from the top of the camera as I was moving the dark slide. This was because one of the flimsy catches holding the camera back in place had slipped undone – something I noticed had happened at the pier, so I am pretty sure that is the source of the leak. I have added a strip of black felt along the top of the back of the camera body to help make a tighter seal and hopefully make the catches engaged more firmly. – So we try again tomorrow.
Here is the one more successful image of Lacock and Fox Talbot’s window.
