Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/09/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]About three blocks from where I live, just about a hundred yards off of Connecticut Avenue, is a tributary stream of Rock Creek called Soapstone Creek. Its origin now bottled up somewhere, the creek emerges from a huge concrete culvert to meander down thru several neighborhoods until it reaches Rock Creek Park. Like Rock Creek Park, Soapstone Valley is also a National Park (probably one of the smallest). Most people who live around here don't know about Soapstone Valley, as it is so well hidden away. It's behind a very busy, built up street, now becoming crowded with large buildings (the Intelsat complex in my other scan is two blocks away). Hard to miss a huge park, you'd think, but it kind of blends in between leafy side streets. Soapstone Vally is plenty big enough to run a dog, a little over half a mile long and about two hundred yards wide -- just enough space so that you can hear lawnmowers going but only occasionally glimpse houses. The stream bed supposedly contains a goodly quantity of soapstone; according to local legend it was once an Indian quarry. I developed the Tech-pan film myself. I think this was an earlier, less than successful effort, as the negative has lots of scratches. But on the good side this was after I learned that Technidol is about the only way to get reasonable contrast out of Tech-pan, so this negative is, I think, beginning to show some potential. http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=344474 I have a medium format shot of this same scene that turned out much better, and that I made into a nice wet print. I tried to do a wet print with the negative scanned here but had a difficult time with it, probably because of hot spots, but I forget now, and anyway never got a print quite to my liking. I do like the scene, nevertheless, and intend to reshoot it periodically.