We spent a few days visiting with friends and family in Las Cruces. Our motel was close to the little town of Mesilla, so it just took a couple minutes to drive there on a Friday morning to visit the plaza and shoot a roll of film in my Brownie Hawkeye Flash.
The town clings tenaciously to its past; things change, but more slowly than in most places. The economy is still closely attached to the land, and traveling south or west quickly brings visitors to fields of onions and vast pecan orchards irrigated only with ground water. The Rio Grande is mostly dry long before it gets to Mesilla; the acequias that run through town contain only sand.
The Kodak Tri-X Pan Professional film I shot in Mesilla was rated at ISO 320; that would be a bit fast for a sunny day in the Brownie Hawkeye Flash, but it seemed like the twenty-seven years beyond the expiration date would likely have tempered the sensitivity of the film sufficiently to allow use in the old box camera. I processed the film as recommended in the data sheet in the film box and I thought the results were pretty good.
6 comments:
The results *are* pretty good, and thank you for giving this view into this little town.
Fields full of onions seems so exotic to me, here in the land of endless corn and soybean fields.
This was our first trip out of town in over a year. It was nice to rediscover some favorite places from our past down south.
A wonderful series of images here Mike. And it appears you guessed absolutely right about how that expired film would perform. These look great!
I haven't been a big fan of expired film, but Andy Morang sent me a bunch of different films that had been in frozen storage. They seem fine except for a small loss of speed.
These negatives look great, with beautiful tonal range. You encountered a real adventure traveler with a classic BMW motorcycle. His (her?) bike was old enough to have drum brakes on the front wheel. Well, old bike, old camera, old film - it all flows together.
Right, that bike fit so well with the style of the old adobe that I wondered if it served any purpose other than decorative.
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