Bumps in the Road

 My Nikon FE has made some good pictures for me, but I haven't made a lot of use of it.  I decided to rectify that neglect with a trip to the zoo on a fine morning.  I made all the shots there with the Vivitar 3.5/70-210mm macro zoom.

  I grabbed a quick still life the next morning and then took a walk in Old Town with the Nikkor -P Auto 2.5/105mm.

When I got to Old Town I found that the meter's batteries had died, so I switched to manual exposure to finish off the roll of Fuji Neopan 400.  Back home, I processed the film in HC110b.  About a third of the zoo shots were blank frames.

The short series of shots from Old Town were ok, so I'm hoping the dying batteries accounted for the missing zoo shots.  I'll shoot another roll of the Neopan 400 to test that theory, and maybe also try developing in PMK to comapare with the HC110 results.

Old Town

 I have been walking around Old Town with my cameras since we moved to Albuquerque about sixteen years ago.  A lot of little shops have come and gone in that time, but the character of the place has largely endured.

Spare Parts

 In one week I managed to break the plastic rewind cranks on two old cameras that I like, the Nikon EM and my two-decade-old Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.  Luckily for me I had a spare crank for the VUWS, and the Nikon EM was put back in working order thanks to the generosity of a friend.

So, time to test the repairs.  I headed over to the Los Poblanos fields to see if I could find some wintering Sandhill Cranes.  Thee were plenty of birds, but none were willing to allow me close enough for a picture.  I had to settle for a shot of an old cottonwood which showed no objection to being photographed.

Nikon EM

The next day I took  both cameras to the Tingley ponds. The little Ultra Wide was loaded with Kendtmere 100.  In the Nikon EM I had a roll of slightly expired Fuji Neopan Presto which Jim Grey sent me some time ago, 

I had walked around one of the ponds with the Vivitar 70-210 Macro Zoom on the Nikon EM.  That gave me more than enough reach to shoot the lounging ducks and geese.  Back at my starting point I rewarded my subjects with a single slice of bread which caused quite a lot of excitement.  There is a sign at the pool's edge requesting that people not feed the birds, but I figured my small transgression would not be noticed.

Shortly afterward this woman arrived in an suv and distributed about forty pounds of bird food to the ducks and geese.  She told me she did this daily!  I captured the scene with the Ultra Wide.

With two rolls of film to process I decided to do them together with semi-stand development in highly diluted HC110, following the technique developed by hjlphotos.  That turned out well with the Fuji Neopan 400.  The Kentmere 100 from the Ultra Wide did not like that choice however, and I had to resort to some careful photoshopping to get something acceptable.

New Mexico's Next Governor

 I found this marvelous image today on Wikipedia while researching Deb Haaland's life story for a post on my other blog.

A wet-plate collodion photograph of Haaland in 2019

Shane Balkowitsch (photographer)

Congresswoman Debra Haaland, “Crushed Turquoise”, Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico’s 1st District, captured in the historic wet plate collodion process of pure silver on glass for “Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective”. This plate will be indefinitely archived at the North Dakota Historical Society here in Bismarck at the Heritage Center. This image of Congresswoman Haaland was taken by Shane Balkowitsch on June 23rd, 2019 in his natural light studio in Bismarck, North Dakota. The original plate now resides in the North Dakota Historical Society archive at the Heritage Center in Bismarck, North Dakota. 8x10” black glass ambrotype, Carl Zeiss Tessar 300mm lens, f4.5, 9 seconds of exposure, natural light through north-facing windows and skylight.

• CC BY-SA 4.0
• File:Congresswoman Debra Anne Haaland - Pueblo Laguna - New Mexico by Shane Balkowitsch in Wet Plate Collodion 6-23-2019.jpg
• Created: 23 June 2019
• Uploaded: 25 June 2019

Winter

BioPark

 

Wood Duck on ice

Mediterranean Conservatory

Tucson

 We will be in Phoenix at the beginning of February, so I may get down  to this WPHS event in Tucson which I have thought about attending for many years.

I have often made the drive down to Tucson in the past to visit two favorite places there.  My cameras have accompanied me on those occasions to the Pima Air and Space Museum and many of the aircraft pictures I have made there are posted in a Flickr album.

Constellation - pinhole

 I have also enjoyed visits to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona to see the current photo exhibits.  The CCP is the repository for the complete works of many of photography's greats including Ansel Adams.

Visits to Tucson invite the possibility of exploring the Saguaro National Park.

San Felipe de Neri

  A clear and cold morning meant there were few tourists in Old Town.  A good day to visit the church in the Plaza Vieja.

At the Botanic Garden