Doctor Michael J. Ware

lately, by the time I've scrounged enough cash out of the tractor beam to kit up, it's a Friday afternoon and B&H is closed

so I make do with supplies from the number of other stores in the city that are open past 2

Black Friday went the way I'd feared it would

blip

by then I'd run out of everything but ink, paper, and patience

and now the ink was out

I went to the other source

guy hands me a little box

by the time I'm at the register I realise that it's the one with the oxalate instead of the citrate so I'm like hold up that's mad expensive can I exchange this and I go back to the guy

yo you got any with the citrate?

and he flips through them and is like we got Van Dyke, New Cyanotype,

none of them say classic?

nah

and I go back to the register and I'm like fine I'll work with this

when I got home I tossed the box into a corner went back out to buy latex gloves and a new bulb for the stove came back and popped open the spare 35mm can with emergency sensitiser that I'd put aside three months ago

coated 15 sheets and

then some parangero swooped in kinda hard with an euphonium and an army vest

over the cacophony someone gave me hand warming packets and a ticket inside

no precipitate formed in the solution upon cooling overnight

the instructions had called for a mortar and pestle to grind the ferricyanide crystals to a powder and I was like fuck that

the instructions had called for the addition of a small vial of ammonium dichromate, with which I'd have been making full-colour enlargements for years by now had I not then and still now been like fuck that

got some crystallisation in the paper once the coating dried though

made things a little pixelated in spots

the measured increase in speed is three stops, enabling the exposure of a mid-density negative under heavy cloud in 15 minutes

presumably, with magenta I'd manage the same in 2