Stop Bath Bettie sat patiently under the lights, the first subject to face the new studio. She did not move or complain, only waited as I worked through the quiet ritual of testing and adjustment. Everything was familiar yet new in its combination: the Speedotron lights, the Ilford direct positive fiber paper, and the vintage Wollensak lens mounted to the Toyo field camera. This was not about taking a picture. It was about learning how these elements spoke to each other.
Eight exposures later, the results were washed out and overexposed. The “negatives” stared back with a kind of quiet honesty. Somewhere between my notes and my adjustments, I discovered that one of the strobes I thought I had turned off had been firing the entire time. Bettie did her job. She revealed what the setup needed to teach me. The light was too much. My assumptions, a little too confident. But each mistake had its place in the process.
What I took from that session was clarity, not disappointment. The day became a study in calibration, not only of light and exposure, but of pace and attention. Consistency revealed itself as the truest teacher. Keep the distance fixed. Keep the light steady. Let the aperture guide the lesson.
There was no image worth keeping, but the session earned its place. It marked the start of the studio finding its rhythm and reminded me that refinement begins exactly where certainty ends.
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Perfect setup
