What once was lost shall be found!

Yesterday I tried to scan my first sheets of 8×10 film but was thwarted by the fact that I could not find my film area guide. This is just a flimsy piece of plastic that helps the scanner calibrate before scanning. Without this simple piece I couldn’t get an image at all. I searched the house high and low – I know I still had it somewhere but, try as I might, finding it was proving to be an impossible task.

Faced with such challenges in the past – this kind of thing is a regular occurrence for me – I decided the best thing to do was to sleep on it. This morning, having exhausted all the possibilities with the house I woke with the sneaky feeling that the guide might actually be in a storage box in the garage – I have a number of plastic boxes with various bits of camera and darkroom in them. After about 30 mins of searching that also came to a dead end.

Now I had seriously drawn a blank so back into the house so search again; which was fruitless, again. Another break from searching and then, an epiphany! Back to garage, on top of the storage is a cardboard box. The cardboard box contain sundry items from my 3D printers and there, right at the bottom, I see a little corner of flimsy plastic. Right there, at the bottom of a box with absolutely no other photographic kit, is my film area guide. I have no idea why it’s in that box but, c’est la vie!

Now I can get onto some scanning and making sure I can remember how to do all of that and get a good image on the computer screen before printing. We’re making progress – slightly faltering – but’s it’s progress!