C-41 Roundup

 I'm proceeding with C-41 experimentation with mixed but encouraging results.  This roll of Fuji 200 with my mju was processed for six minutes at 95F.  The shadows lost a little detail, so I may need to add a minute for the next roll.  The good part was that I had to spend very little time stamping out little white spots in the skies.  The lower processing temp does seem to help quite a bit in keeping the emulsion intact.

Albuquerque got some snow last week, but we're now back to 70 deg. temps like much of the Mountain West.

I've spent a lot of time over the years we've lived in Albuquerque at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.  They have frequently hosted very good photo exhibits, and we have enjoyed a lot of films and live performances on the indoor and outdoor stages.  I have also benefitted from the Spanish language course offerings at the Cervantes Institute.

I have not been inspired to take many pictures of the Cultural Center.  The architecture of the main buildings clearly incorporates features from both Native American and Hispanic sources, but it seems to me the architects chose  to focus on aspects of those two cultures which prioritized size and power assertions over functional quality.  

I was pleased to see recently that the Center had inaugurated a new outdoor gallery with the first exhibit being about the architecture of the site.  I thought that perhaps I would gain a new appreciation of the visual appearance of the place that has so far escaped me.  I was disappointed to find that the information presented on metal panels hung on the site's west side fence were more about the history of the site's development than about the architectural features.  Even more distressing is the fact that viewers of the exhibit are slow-moving targets on a very busy bike path.  That is something that can be easily corrected by just flipping the panels so they would be viewable from the safety of the site on the other side of the fence.  Hopefully, that will happen before someone is run down.

I have not got back inside the Albuquerque Art Museum since it reopened recently, but I have made a couple more shots of the museum shop window in an effort to capture some of the interesting colors and reflections.