The Chess Set

   My first full-time job in San Francisco was in an office building on Mission Street.  Next door was a junk store in which I found an old bone chess set; I took ten dollars from my first paycheck to buy it.  My friend who was an artist painted a chess board for me on a square canvas.

I imagine a lot of small decorative objects were manufactured from bone prior to the widespread use of bakelite and other plastics early in the Twentieth Century.  The pieces in my chess set were turned on a lathe, with the small component parts threaded and then screwed together.

I've always liked the graceful design of my bone chess set and thought it would be a nice subject for some still life photographs.  So, nearly fifty years on, I'm beginning to work on that idea.

I only got a couple shots from the roll of Kentmere 100 that approached what I had in mind for portraying the chess set.  The +4 accessory lens I had for my Nikon was a little too strong for the job.  I'll try again with some equipment better suited to the task, and add a tripod so I can stop down for better depth of field.

I took the camera outside to shoot a few frames to get a better idea of how the Kentmere 100 was going to work with undiluted Kodak Xtol developer.  I thought the result was pretty good, though I'm wondering if the tonal range might be a bit better with 1:1 processing.

About ten years ago I did use the chess pieces as a subject when learning to use the Sketchup 3D drawing program.  My first results from that exercise were pretty crude, but I got a little better with practice and managed to make a desktop background picture of the two queens which I still have on my old 386 computer that I use for scanning and editing my photos.

I think the red and white color scheme for the opposing pieces was common in past centuries.  I will have to try some color film for the subject.