f233











I went to the nearby botanical gardens this morning with a newly installed pinhole with a 0.150 mm aperture. That is a little small from my focal length of around 35 mm, but it seems a bit sharper to me than the recommended 0.220 mm aperture. I do need to blacken the back side of the pinhole disk as I got a narrow, arcing flare in a couple frames. The sunny scene exposure at 100 ISO with this f-stop is two seconds.

morning flight



The world probably doesn't need more balloon photos, but it's hard to resist their appeal as they drift close by. This one touched down about 25 feet from my car just after I had parked for a walk near the river. The pilot was following another balloon that had made a perfect landing a few minutes earlier, coming down just yards from the chase truck. A fickle breeze pushed the second one a bit too close to a car-filled parking lot, and the pilot shot a jet of flame up into his envelope to lift up again and drift southward over the riverside bosque.

Rio Grande Bosque

Public Transportation



Phoenix is a good place to indulge an interest in urban design. There is a lot of interesting late Twentieth-Century architecture downtown, and new buildings are always on the way up. I think the place is particularly appealing for me partly because downtown Albuquerque is such an architectural disaster area. Also, it is about as easy to get around in Phoenix as in Albuquerque, even though the Arizona city is much the larger.



Phoenicians probably thought the traffic jam on Central due to the light rail construction would never end. Now that it is operational, however, one of the most impressive aspects of the new system is the way it fits so seamlessly into the city grid. The trolleys have their own lane down the middle of the streets and the rate of travel is well-coordinated with the lights and traffic flow to interfere very minimally with the vehicular traffic. The sleek design of the trolley cars and the minimalist stations fits very nicely with the look of the city.



At present, the ticketing system is largely symbolic. The saguaro-enhanced tickets are dispensed from machines near the stops at a reasonable rate of $2.50 for all-day transportation. Nobody bothers to check if riders actually have tickets after boarding, but I suppose that will change once the ridership is firmly established.

Electronic parking meters and ticketing machines like those in Phoenix have recently become nearly as ubiquitous as the ATM. The previous generations of such devices, while based on mechanical designs, nevertheless incorporated many of the same concepts for managing service delivery currently in use. There is a very fine article on the development of ticket-dispensing to be found at the Design Observer blog.

Cottonwood Bosque





The flowers are Evening Primrose beside the toy train track at Tingley Beach where I left the car. I grew some like these from seed this year, but haven't seen any flowers on them so far. Maybe next year.

Phoenix

back at the river

The VUWS Phenomenon



I've added a few words to the page on my website devoted to the Vivitar p&s cameras. As I noted there, when people talk about the topics of "film vs digital" or the ever popular "death of film", due recognition is seldom given to the toy cameras and their users around the world. The Holga may still be the champ in the toy category, but the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim is breathing down its neck.

Another interesting aspect of these simple cameras is the price they are presently bringing. This is due in part to the fact that production of the Vivitar UW&S was discontinued about the time the camera got really popular. The prices shot through the roof, and haven't really abated even though the VUWS has been resurrected under a couple other names.

I paid $10 for my first VUWS and thought that a bit high. The next one, I found at a thrift store for 99 cents. Meanwhile, I've seen the camera selling as high as $50 on ebay, and routinely at the $20-$40 level. My guess would be that the east Asian factories churning out these cameras are doing so for a couple bucks each, at most.

Now, for my dilemma. I just picked up another Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim in unused condition for 99 cents. The wrist strap is still neatly folded and held in place by a rubber band. There is also a folded instruction sheet entitled, "35 mm Outdoor Camera". I'm not going to sell it for the outrageous price it would probably bring, but I'd like to see someone get it that would put it to good use. Suggestions will be welcomed.

down by the river









I've been waiting all year for the blooming of the yerba mansa near the river. The patches more exposed to the sunlight are just starting to bloom, while those in the shade of the cottonwoods are still without flowers.

Photographers and their Cameras

For a vintage camera enthusiast it is always fun to come across a picture of one of the old cameras being put to use at around the time it was being actively produced and marketed. It isn't hard to find pictures of famous photographers posing with their Leica and Rolleiflex cameras. Some of the others, though, are hard to find in the photographic record. When I picked up a copy recently of the book, the camera i, I was pleased to discover there are two pictures in the collection assembled by Audrey and Sydney Irmas of well-known photographers from the classic age using compact folding plate cameras.



The picture of Brassai standing behind a plate camera on a tripod is a bit surprising as he is most famous for his gritty shots of Paris night life. His accomplishment is all that more impressive when you realize that he made many of the photos with equipment that more modern photographers would consider impossibly awkward. I can't tell which model Brassai's camera is in the picture, but I thought it interesting that it is equipped with a rollfilm back which looks just like the Rada that I use with both my Kodak Recomar 18 and my Zeiss Ikon Maximar A.

I'm not sure of the model that is being wielded by Morris Engel either; it may be one of the pre-Kodak Nagel plate cameras, given the Compur shutter and the Schneider-Kreuznach lens. Like many other pros of the era, Engel would move on to using more easily-managed Twin-Lens Reflex cameras. Judging by the rectangular format and good resolution of many of his images, though, he seems to have used the plate camera quite a lot. Like Brassai, Engel made a lot of his exposures on the street, many of the early ones in Coney Island and other parts of Brooklyn.



While reading Engel's biography, I was reminded to look at the fine work done by his equally famous photographer wife, Ruth Orkin. She did a lot of shots of New York streets too, but since she grew up in Hollywood she often veered toward more glamorous subjects including film and TV stars. Among the pictures of Orkin herself, I found a very rare shot which included a Kodak Retina IIa in the portrait. That was a camera probably not often used by classic documentary photographers like Orkin, but it was nevertheless very well made and the Xenon lens was as good as any of the time.



I've displayed only small thumbnail images for Engel and Orkin here in order to stay within a generally accepted standard of fair use. Clicking on the thumbnails will take you to the web sites of the two photographers' work where larger images may be viewed.

steal this photo



Modern computer screens do a pretty nice job of displaying photo art. I've made a number of wallpaper images recently to put on my desktop, and I've decided to share some of them on a new page at my Photography web site. No need for expensive framing, or for pounding nails in the wall. Just download and enjoy.

TtV





I couldn't pass up this ten-dollar bakelite beauty during a Sunday visit to the flea market. I first made some traditional b&w images on Acros. Then, I used the digital to shoot a few through the brilliant viewfinder of the Super Seventy-five. A page about the camera is on my vintage cameras site.