Thing 277 Develop a Photograph

Token Northy arrives in the door of the house one Saturday evening. Crammed into the tiny downstairs toilet room is Little Flower, me, and Pony Boy. This room is not big enough for three people, but it's the best we can come up with for a "dark room" at short notice. Thankfully, and in spite of the four men living in the house, it doesn't smell terrible in there. It doesn't smell fantastic, but it's not terrible either.

The Thing for the day; to take an old style photograph with a long exposure camera. I know what you're thinking now; What the funk is a long exposure camera. You plebs don't even know what a long exposure camera is? Honestly? You morons... ahem. The Frenchman took about an hour and a half to explain it to me. I used to be a moron too...

Basically it's a wooden box which takes about two to three minutes to take a photo. It's a pin-hole camera. It's supposed to take really funky, if slightly blurry photos. So we set it up in O'Connell's on the corner of a table where we could watch the world go by... not in a voyeuristic pervert kind of way, in a romantic, see the world through rose tinted glasses kind of way. We're not perverts.
Look there's a Frenchman with a camera. Many of his people have been notable artists. And by his people I mean men with long hair, not French people.

The Thing was not to take a photo with a silly camera, it was to develop a photo. The point is to be one of them fancy snoops from a nineteen fifty's private eye movie. You know the ones: when they've got a fancy hanging line, and a red light, and there's cigarette smoke everywhere. There's nothing fancy about our "lab"- it's literally a toilet. With a kitchen seat. We'd the solution spread out in small containers, and four of us crammed ourselves in.

Four adults wedged into a tiny toilet. Stupid idea. We've loads of them.
Pure disaster as it turns out. Not because there was too many of us crammed in a tiny toilet. We made some stupid decisions regarding how long we left the negative exposed, we also tried to cook as we attempted to develop the negative. We may, or may not have exposed the negative to light before its time. What I'm telling you is that mistakes were made. Probably.

Like so many other Things on the Project... something of a failure. But wait... there's light at the end of the tunnel. In taking a relatively harmless photo of our blank negative, we somehow managed to see "Ghost Pony Boy". Check it out... like a creepy shadow of a tall strange man, he fits perfectly in the window over my right shoulder in the photo below...
Creepy right? It's amazing. For a little while I was tempted to pass this off a paranormal hoax, but I thought better of it. Just enjoy the creepiness of it. And while you're at it, check out that awesome lower lip shake...

I was upset. We wasted a whole day on that blank piece of paper. Still. We got a creepy photo. Not a total loss then.