A Conquered Effect of Heat on Art

It's hot, at least locally, and as can be expected this makes me think of my past.

I think I've been told that I was born on the hottest day of the year, which may or may not be true but does work as a way of cementing my relationship with heat. It may well have been hotter outside than in womb, so right after coughing and crying I may have begun sweating.

A year or so later it was, again, the hottest day of the year and this time I remember seeing pictures of my first or second birthday featuring a cake, a smiling baby, and a melting, drooping candle that wasn't yet lit.

But I don't remember any of that. What I *do* remember is my love affair with photography during my college years. I bought cameras, darkroom equipment, film, papers, and chemicals by the truckload and stumbled upon a relic of my youth. For all the years of my life in the hallway of my parent's home was a small thermometer on a sheet of aluminum engraved with the degrees. The whole thing was maybe six inches long, about as long as my open hand, and was made by Kodak.

How we ended up with a Kodak thermometer is anyone's guess, but it wasn't until I began developing film and printing photos that I noticed the thermometer had an arrow on it, highlighting sixty-eight degrees.

Sixty-eight are the exact number of degrees that every film and paper producer use for the standard, recommended, temperature of the chemicals and washes. This no longer matters, but I mention it for historical purposes.

It's easy to see where heatwaves enter into this. During the hot summer months I was occasionally stymied. The cold water in places I lived would not infrequently be over that magical sixty-eight degrees. There's not much I could ever do to make my cold water colder, and other than sweating into the stop bath and adjusting time, I was stuck.

I've no doubt that today the cold water is well into the seventies. I also doubt today's digital photographers have any idea how easy they have it, though they may still be sweating when they take their pictures.