A Rough Neighborhood

 Some media attention has been given lately to the discovery and dating of the preserved footprints of humans and extinct animals in the dry bed of an ancient lake in White Sands National Monument.  The DNA of pollen associated with the prints suggests an age of twenty thousand years.  That puts the arrival of humans in the New World much further back in time than previously thought.  It also means that the humans were coexisting with some fearsome large predators including Saber-toothed Cats and Dire Wolves.

The Dire Wolf exhibit at the Natural History Museum is nicely lit by large nearby windows, making it an attractive subject for my cameras.  On this occasion I was shooting my Olympus Pen-FT with the 1.8/38mm lens.

The Stylus Epic

 I decided I really needed to put more film through my Olympus Stylus Epic so I loaded a roll of Kodak UltraMax 400 and carried the camera in my pocket for a week, with walks through Old Town and the UNM campus.

Dane Smith Hall

A lawn art statue representing the UNM Lobo mascot

I had not been on the campus in some time and it seemed a lot bigger than I remembered it.  I visit the Plaza Vieja in Albuquerque's Old Town at least weekly and it is much less of a challenge to my limited mobility. 

As usual on a Friday morning there was a long line of restored classic cars in front of the church.

1938 Chev

upholstery talk

All of the cars are ones I had seen and photographed before, except for the little blue Mercury Comet, perhaps the most modest model to carry the Mercury name; I think this was an early one.

The camera seems to work perfectly.  Its only issue is a small light leak, and a narrow stip of electrical tape easily deals with that.  The Stylus Epic is even smaller than the compact Infinity Stylus and the 4-element 2.8/35mm lens is a bit more sophisticated than the earlier mju's 3.5/35mm, though I don't see a significant difference in the quality of the pictures between the two.  I actually prefer the handling of the earlier Infinity Stylus, but it may be I am just more familiar with the older camera because I have put a lot of film through it over the last fifteen years.

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.

mju

I found a half dozen of the Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) camera over the years at Albuquerque thrift stores, with prices ranging from $2 to $10.  A short time into the revival of interest in film photography I started seeing them being sold on ebay for as much as $300.  Lately, they seem to be obtainable for around $100.  I suppose the demand is driven by the same factors that made the camera very popular when it appeared in 1990.  Focusing, exposure and film advance are all automatic.  It is small enough to slip easily into a pocket, and requires only that you flip open the camera, aim and press the button to get your shot.

The fully automated camera thus fulfills most needs for most people, though it would be useful to have a little more manual control occasionally.  For instance, many modern films — both b&w and color — seem to do best when given an extra stop of exposure.  For these shots made last week in Old Town with the mju I added just a little extra time to the development to compensate for slight under-exposure.

The corner of Church and San Felipe

An Old Town cat with boundless self-confidence

A happy duck at Tingley Ponds

Color for the Pen-FT

 I bought ten rolls of cheap Kodak color with the intent of shooting them mostly in my Olympus Pen-FT, five Kodak Gold 200 and five Ultramax 400.  Of these pictures on the Gold 200, the first four were shot at the zoo with the Olympus E. Zuiko 3.5/100mm.  The rest were from the Olympus F.Zuiko 1.8/38mm.

 

 

Coming off the scanner the colors looked a little muddy.  It may be that I let the Cinestill C-41 developer age a bit too much since I last used it.  I'll try an extra stop of exposure on the next roll to see it that gets better results.

Time Flies

 The arrival of wintering Sandhill Cranes is usually heard before it is seen. Their strange, trilling calls carry for great distances in the winter blue sky. It is a sound that came from the sky a million years before the first humans appeared anywhere on the planet.

I have seen fewer cranes this year in the usual places I find them.  I attribute that to the fact than no corn was planted this year at the Los Poblanos Open Space. It took me a week of walking around the Open Space fields and through the riverside forest to get close enough for a few shots of the birds with my longest telephoto.

Building the Pen-FT System

I've been somewhat intimidated by the prices for lenses to fit my Olympus Pen-FT, so I was surprised recently to find an ebay listing for a 100mm telephoto for just forty bucks, shipping included from Japan.  It was clearly a risk on several levels, but there are no blemishes on the glass or the external surfaces and the focus is smooth.  The small size of the lens is a bit shocking, particularly because the 100mm actually corresponds to 140mm on a full-frame 35mm camera

* * *

I loaded a roll of Kodak Gold 200 in the Pen-FT and started off with some shots of familiar subjects around the house and in Old Town for the sake of comparison.

The next day I mounted the new telephoto and finished off the roll at the Zoo.

No complaints about the image quality from the 100mm; it seems to me that the contrast and resolution are up to what I expect from Olympus.  However, the 3.5 maximum aperture did challenge my focusing ability with the cloudy day lighting.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Bajo la luna gitana,
las cosas la están mirando
y ella no puede mirarlas.

Romance Sonámbulo
Federico García Lorca (1928)