New Mexico's Next Governor

 I found this marvelous image today on Wikipedia while researching Deb Haaland's life story for a post on my other blog.

A wet-plate collodion photograph of Haaland in 2019

Shane Balkowitsch (photographer)

Congresswoman Debra Haaland, “Crushed Turquoise”, Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico’s 1st District, captured in the historic wet plate collodion process of pure silver on glass for “Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective”. This plate will be indefinitely archived at the North Dakota Historical Society here in Bismarck at the Heritage Center. This image of Congresswoman Haaland was taken by Shane Balkowitsch on June 23rd, 2019 in his natural light studio in Bismarck, North Dakota. The original plate now resides in the North Dakota Historical Society archive at the Heritage Center in Bismarck, North Dakota. 8x10” black glass ambrotype, Carl Zeiss Tessar 300mm lens, f4.5, 9 seconds of exposure, natural light through north-facing windows and skylight.

• CC BY-SA 4.0
• File:Congresswoman Debra Anne Haaland - Pueblo Laguna - New Mexico by Shane Balkowitsch in Wet Plate Collodion 6-23-2019.jpg
• Created: 23 June 2019
• Uploaded: 25 June 2019

Winter

BioPark

 

Wood Duck on ice

Mediterranean Conservatory

Tucson

 We will be in Phoenix at the beginning of February, so I may get down  to this WPHS event in Tucson which I have thought about attending for many years.

I have often made the drive down to Tucson in the past to visit two favorite places there.  My cameras have accompanied me on those occasions to the Pima Air and Space Museum and many of the aircraft pictures I have made there are posted in a Flickr album.

Constellation - pinhole

 I have also enjoyed visits to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona to see the current photo exhibits.  The CCP is the repository for the complete works of many of photography's greats including Ansel Adams.

Visits to Tucson invite the possibility of exploring the Saguaro National Park.

San Felipe de Neri

  A clear and cold morning meant there were few tourists in Old Town.  A good day to visit the church in the Plaza Vieja.

At the Botanic Garden

 

Adventures in Film Photography

 My repair of the meter coupling on the Nikon EM seemed a success, so time for a test.

 I mounted the 50/1.8 Series E lens and loaded the camera with a roll of Arista 200. As sometimes happens I did not get the tongue of the film into the take-up spool quite right, so I gave the rewind knob a couple turns back and opened the camera back to try again.  I then saw that I had rolled the film leader completely back into the cassette.  I threw the film with disgust into the trash -- only to retrieve it seconds later as I remembered that I had a reloadable cassette to which the film could be transferred.  I put everything into the dark bag, pried open the Arista cassette and had the reel and film in the reloadable cassette in  a couple minutes.

I carried the Nikon EM around for about a week to finish the test roll and the meter worked smoothly as expected under a variety of conditions.  I finished off the roll with a couple shots around the house and then proceeded to crank the rewind knob to get the film back in the cartridge.  The plastic rewind knob cracked in half on the first turn.
 

The whole thing went back into the black bag so I could fish out the exposed film and get it into the Paterson tank for processing.  As I expected, all the images looked to be properly exposed.

This through-the-window shot was made with a Vivitar 70-210 f/3.5 Macro Focusing Zoom

 
The prospects for repair of the rewind knob looked dim.  In a search on the web I found that a broken rewind knob on the EM is not an uncommon problem. Replacements are available on ebay, but they are generally priced higher than what I paid for the camera. The same knob is on several Nikon models, so perhaps something will turn up to get the camera back into operation. I hope so, as I like the light-weight and compact Nikon and its little Series E lens.