Ultra Wide Sunday

Becky and Shane Ramotowski

I enjoyed a long stroll through Albuquerque's Old Town on Sunday morning with Becky and Shane Ramotowski.  Becky had suggested a walkabout with the little Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim camera.  Seemed like a good excuse to dust off the vuws which has long been one of my top favorite shooters.  I loaded one vuws with TMAX 100 and the other with some Fuji 400 Ultra.  I figured that would cover about any lighting situation we were likely to run into. 


In addition to her well-worn ultra wide, Becky was also toting a new Instax camera which spits out small prints as fast as you can push the release.  She gave both cameras a good workout.

Becky, an astronomer by vocation, can also be fairly described as a multimedia artist.  She is at home with both words and pictures as a former weekly columnist with a San Antonio newspaper.  Her work with fabrics is in evidence in those cool knit caps the two are wearing in the picture.  Her pinhole photographs are produced with wood, tin and cardboard cameras which she crafts herself.  Pictures from those cameras are featured in her blog, Palomino Pinhole.  Becky's work is also a regular feature at the Filmwasters' Forum.

Shane is also an astronomer and has a background which includes newspaper photo work.  He showed up for our stroll packing a Mamiya 645.  It seems Shane's real passion these days, however, is digital.  The digital realm he inhabits is not the point-and-shoot variety most of us are familiar with.  Rather, he uses ultra-sensitive sensors, along with sophisticated tracking and computing technology to sort out the light from distant stars to produce masterpieces of astrophotography which can take weeks or months to assemble. The products of all that meticulous work can be seen at Shane's Astrophotos web site.

Truth be told, I'm not much of a multi-tasker.  Walking around with other photographers and trying to take pictures at the same time seldom produces images of much interest from my cameras.  The upside on this occasion, of course, was that I had the opportunity to watch two extremely talented people at work and to talk to them at length about all kinds of photography-related subjects.

While I did not bring home any photo trophies from Old Town other than the shot of the Ramotowskis, I did manage to get out on my own later in the day to finish off the roll of TMAX in my vuws.  The pictures I like best from that part of the day show the interesting melding of trees and their shadows produced by the low New Mexico sun against adobe walls.

I still have a full unexposed roll of color in the other camera, so hope to have some more to show from my favorite point-and-shoot sometime soon.