A Fine Day for Tractors

The Corrales Tractor Club put on a show Saturday.  Lots of restored tractors, custom cars, military vehicles, and good hotdogs.  What more could a guy ask for?  I took along my Argoflex Forty loaded with Lomography 100 color film to test the results of the shutter cleaning.

Toy tractors were a big toy store item for many years.  I don't know if they remain so popular today.  I always had toy tractors of various kinds as a kid, the most common being the green John Deere models.

The appeal of tractors to city kids is a little mysterious since few would have any experience with the real thing.  My guess is that some of the attraction is attributable to family histories of migrants from rural areas to the cities during the Depression years.  Back then, having your plow pulled by a tractor rather than a team of horses or mules was certainly a symbol of prosperity and progress.  I don't recall family conversations about tractors, but they did keep me well supplied with the toy versions.  My grandparents moved from rural Wisconsin to Seattle in the late 1930s.  My father's family were farmers in Nebraska.  My grandfather ended up working a long time in Seattle at a John Deere warehouse, so I did have a little direct experience with the machines as a child.

I actually reversed the family migration history in my mid-thirties, moving from San Francisco to rural Idaho.  I did some farm work there which included a year as the maintenance man for the Elmore County Fairground.  Part of that job gave me the frequent opportunity to drive a Farmall tractor.  It was great fun.

I shot the cars and military vehicles on a roll of Fomapan 200 in the Nikon EM  which I'll run through some PMK Pyro developer later today.  While I was pleased to see the Varex lens turning in its usual fine performance, I was not as happy with the Lomography film which has given me better results in the past.  This roll showed some odd white spotting.  I can't yet rule out problems with my processing, so I'll try some other color film with the Unicolor kit soon to try to sort things out.  I also got some light leak along the film edges which shows I need to exercise more care in respooling 120 roll film onto the 620 reels.