The Paper Alternative

 I mentioned in a recent blog post that I regretted not getting around to making pinhole photos in a large format.  A day later my friend, Bob Eggers, showed up at my place with a finely crafted pinhole camera he built which accepts 4x5 film holders.  

Bob had loaded a couple holders with pre-flashed printing paper normally used for making enlargements in the darkroom.  Behind the pinhole he had installed a yellow-green filter for the purpose of moderating the paper's tendency to produce overly contrasty images.  So, nothing left for me to do but go out and make the shots and then see what would turn up in the darkroom.  What could be simpler?

Well, making a couple shots in Old Town went well enough, but the long time that had gone by since I was last in a darkroom sabotaged the outcome.

I set up my trays with developer and fixer,  switched on a red light, opened the film holders and popped the exposed paper sheets into the developer.  At which point I realized that I had neglected to turn off the little bathroom nightlight !  

So a couple fogged negatives as a reward for my bumbling effort.

When I got up the next day I noticed that the morning light on the historic Henry Mann house across the street was very nice.  Trial Two went off with no self-inflicted injury this time.  

 

 

I was pleased with the outcome.  The one minute exposures in the camera seemed about right.

I used HC110, dilution B, for the developing. The negatives were dark and somewhat contrasty as expected, but they scanned pretty well using my iPhone.  I put the paper negative into the film holder from my old Epson flatbed scanner to hold it flat and lit it with a table lamp.  That worked well enough, but I also decided to try backlighting the negatives and did that by placing the holder on top of my large LED panel. 

The backlit image may be a tiny bit sharper, but I really saw very little difference from the overhead lamp light.

This was actually my second time for shooting on paper.  The first was about three years ago, also with Bob's considerable assistance.  That endeavor seemed a lot easier as I was using a No.3A Folding Pocket Kodak with an actual lens, a Rapid Rectilinear, which permitted an exposure of just two seconds at f/16.

I may not do much more with paper negatives, but this experience has been fun, and I certainly recommend giving it a try if you are looking for something out of the ordinary in your photographic journey.

Some Rain Would Be Nice

 I have been carrying around the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim for a couple weeks, trying to finish off a roll of Kentmere 200.  I got close to the end with an early walk to the river.  Only a trickle of water in the Rio Grande these days.

 Just enough for Roxie to get her feet wet.

 The riverside forest looks surprisingly good considering the heat and sparse rainfall.

 I am told that the Yerba Mansa is blooming profusely and there is a. bumper crop of wolf berries, though I may not make it to that part of the river to see them this year.

I was disappointed with the results from the Kentmere 200 as the first roll I tried some time ago showed a much nicer spectrum of tonality.  I can't rule out processing issues, but doubt I'll shoot another roll of the 200 any time soon. 

I'm also unhappy with the GIMP photo editor at present as it seems to be under constant revision.  I had it working pretty well for a while,  but now some of the tools seem to interfere with each other. 

Tingley Summer

 Summer heat crashed into Albuquerque well in advance of the summer solstice.  The city's residents are hopeful now that the monsoon rains will arrive on schedule to moderate the solar blast.

From. a 2005 visit to Chaco Canyon:

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The sun announces

The longest day for each year

At Fajada Butte. 

Fajada Butte rises up out of the Chacra Mesa about a mile south of the Una Vida great house. 

Near the top of the butte is an archaeoastronomical feature known as the "Sun Dagger". The Anasazi carved a spiral there on a rock face on which shafts of sunlight appear at midday to mark the solstices and equinoxes.

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A Walk In The Park

Some clouds and a light rain has provided us with respite from too-early Summer weather.  I  loaded a roll of Kentmere 400 in the pinhole camera and took a stroll through near-by Tiguex Park.

When You Grow Up

Roy and Dale Evans Rogers

I have a memory from childhood being asked by adults what I wanted to be when I grew up.  It was posed as a binary choice -- Cowboy or Fireman.  Those categories seem somewhat strange these days, but I suppose they were the product of the popular culture of the day in the form of books and films, along with the content of early TV programming.  I think I realized at the time that there was an element of intended humor in the question, but I'm pretty sure I always responded "Cowboy", as unlikely as the choice seemed even then.

Do present day children undergo such interrogation?  If so, I imagine the choices might be somewhat different, since few children these days would know about Roy Rogers or Gene Autry.  TV series featuring firefighters are fairly common, and I would think astronauts might be entered into the equation. And, what of girls?  What kind of career choices, facetious or otherwise, would have been -- are -- proffered?  

Well, I never became a fireman or a cowboy. My career trajectory was sporadic.  What persisted over the years was an interest in photography, though never as a significant source of income.  I had some opportunities for photographing cowboys when we lived in southern New Mexico, but seldom produced images of that subject.

I did focus on the subject of firefighting and have made a lot of images over the years, mostly of fire trucks which have been portrayed by many of my old film cameras.  Sheer luck brought me the opportunity to make images of firefighters in action.  In 1970 my pictures of the rescue of a firefighter on a San Francisco rooftop made the front page of the SF Chronicle.

Pentax Spotmatic

Earlier, about 1967, I happened on a big lumberyard fire in Brooklyn which I captured with my Nikon S.

Since those days my collection of old cameras has accounted for a lot of shots of fire engines in Albuquerque.

Kodak Ritina IIc

Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim

Kodak Flash Bantam

Voigtlander Vito II

Voigtlander Vito II

YashicaMat

Olympus Infinity Stylus

I actually did get closer to being a fireman than a cowboy.  Jobs were hard to find in the 1970s, which impelled me to apply for a firefighter job in a community north of Oakland.  I easily passed the written test, but that was as far as I got with that prospect.  The possibility that I might be required to drive one of those big trucks was terrifying

So, my hat is off in front of those fellows who did take up the challenge, and thanks for the opportunity to make pictures of that noble calling. 

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Meanwhile:

"... the cost of a fire truck used to pump water through hoses rose from roughly $300,000 to $500,000 in the mid 2010s to nearly $1 million today..."

- Jacobin 

and...

'Cowboys for Trump' founder charged in Jan. 6 riot no longer supports Trump 

- Santa Fe New Mexican 

Blue (prints)

 The Soho Photo Gallery announcements of current shows appear weekly in my email and always make me wish I lived closer to the Big Apple.  This week's message was about two artists who make cyanotype prints on fabric, Kevin Rose Schultz and Jessie Swimeley.  I particularly enjoyed working my way through the website of Jessie Swimeley from Caldwell, Idaho.  Swimeley's work can also be seen on her Instagram account.

Swimeley does marvelous work with the cyanotype process, but she is also an accomplished photographer with a range of analog and digital work to her credit.  She has me thinking I should make use of that envelope of cyanotype paper I picked up some time ago from the gift shop at the NM Natural History Museum.

The cyanotype show opening will be shared as a free zoom presentation on June 10th. 

Alternate Realities

The practice of photography often emphasizes maximum control of every vairable.  Pinhole photography on the other hand offers the possibility of relinquishing control to some extent to venture into exploring the unknown and unexpected.

While one has awareness of an ultra wide view and a near- infinite depth of field, exactly how those will be expressed in the captured image is hard to accurately foresee.  I frequently mount my pinhole camera on a small tabletop tripod because I like the low angle views which that allows.  A side effect of that choice is some guesswork in aim that often results in the inclusion of unanticipated elements.         

While sunlit scenes can be captured by the pinhole in a second or two, a shaded subject typically requires an exposure of eight or ten seconds, and picture making in interiors can require many minutes to completion.  In that length of time people may unexpectedly wander through the field of view, leaving behind ghostly traces of their passage.

Much of the above was part of my experience on a recent stroll through Old Town Albuquerque with my pinhole camera.  The subjects at hand were all very familiar, but the pinhole gave me images of a novel character where my other cameras would likely only have duplicated past experience.

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PS:  I lost two frames from this roll of Kentmere because I could not see the dim frame numerals through the ruby window.  So I have poked out the window. I'll report back about the issue after the next roll.