Good for Anything That Ails You

 The Yerba Mansa has bloomed along the Rio Grande a little earlier than usual this year, perhaps because of the unusually warm weather and high water.

From a 2009 blog post:

I first encountered Yerba Mansa in a little bog between the road and the Rio Grande about twenty miles north of Las Cruces. The photo of the flower was made on June 9, 2002 using a little 1.3 megapixel OLYMPUS D360-L. A lot of water has flowed down the river since then.

So my initial knowledge of the plant coincided with the beginning of digital photography.  Since I made that first picture with the simple little Olympus D360 I have photographed the plant nearly every year since with many of my old film cameras.

Modern medicine has not found a useful remedy in the Yerba Mansa, but many Native American peoples used all parts of the plant to treat every imaginable ailment.  I'm thinking perhaps I'll try it this year in a tea.

Vivitar PN2011

I picked up a Vivitar PN2011 twenty years ago at a Las Cruces thrift shop for two bucks.  I was impressed with the sharp pictures that the simple point-and-shoot could produce.  I only shot a couple rolls with that camera before I got distracted with all the others I was finding at bargain prices at that time on ebay.  The best of the PN2011 pictures came from a Campo Santo in Las Cruces and from a trip to the most southern Chaco outlier on Alamosa Creek.

 

 

I turned that original PN2011 into a pinhole camera and never used the panoramic format option.  I found another in Albuquerque at about the same price as the first and decided to try it as a panoramic shooter during a walk through the Botanic Garden.  The film on this occasion was Kodak Gold 200.

The pictures from this second PN2011 don't seem as sharp to me as the ones I got from the first one, so I may have to look for another.

Switching to panoramic mode changes the view through the finder and narrows the image width on the film with a couple movable panels.  The altered view may help a bit with visualizing the panoramic potential of the scene, but not much is gained in camera that can't be achieved by just cropping the full image.

The Mamiya 6

 The Mamiya 6 meduim-format folding rangefinder camera was made over a period of fifty years with many model variations.  In spite of that long history, high quality construction and unique features it is curiously rare on web sites devoted to vintage cameras.

From the front the Mamiya 6 resembles other popular medium-format rangefinders of the same era such as the Zeiss Ikonta and the Soviet Iskra.  A top/rear view shows what sets the Mamiya apart from all others in its class.  The thumb wheel to the right adjusts focus by moving the film plane rather than the front lens standard. Also visible in the same view is the switch to the left which permits either 6x6 or 6x4.5 formats.  The flip-open ruby window only needs to be used to position the first frame; frame spacing from there on is automatic.

 The format switch changes the aspect ratio in the viewfinder and also releases the double exposure lock.  To actually ready the camera for either format, one opens the back, slides out the removable pressure plate and flips a couple barn doors to the appropriate position.  The 120 roll film can than be threaded through the exposed rails and the pressure plate slid back into taking position.

I have so far only shot one test roll with the camera in Albuquerque's Old Town.  Everything seems to be working perfectly.  The film was Fomapan 100 which I developed in Rodinal 1:50.  The  Olympus D. Zuiko 3.5/75mm lens performed well as expected.

 

An overview of the Mamiya 6 history and features can be found at the Camera-Wiki site.