P30 Hits a Pothole

 I found a couple rolls of Ferrania P30 in my refrigerator donated by a generous friend.  I decided to give it another go after looking at my first experience with this slow, high-contrast, fine-grain film.  The first time I shot this film was in a camera with which I was unfamiliar; I didn't know what to make of the results.  Taking a second look, I decided the stuff looked promising.  I loaded the film in my 1955 FED 1g, a Leica clone from the Soviet era.

Not far into the roll of film, the advance started getting erratic.  I skipped some frames trying to get past the problem, but it only got worse.  Halfway through the roll the advance locked up.  I called it a day, and went home to process the P30 in Rodinal 1:100, stand development.

There is nothing actually wrong with the 1g.  The issue is the difference in the height of the modern film cartridges from the height of the reloadable cassettes designed for the FED 1g and similar FED and Zorki cameras from the same era.  My solution up to now has been to lay a penny on top of the film cassette to compensate for the lesser height of the modern film cassettes.  As the current experience demonstrates, this is not the ideal solution.

So, I disassembled the camera in order to clean out the chewed up film bits.  I wiggled the advance mechanism a bit to get it turning again and lubricated the advance gear train with some light oil.  That got things working pretty smoothly, so I reassembled the camera and looked for a better way to align the film in the camera.  What I came up with was a plastic washer the same diameter as the film cassette and about the right thickness to to hold the film cassette down to allow the film to travel through the camera without jumping off the sprockets.

I've got one more roll of P30.  I'll load it up in the 1g and try shooting a stop faster to see if I get better highlight and shadow detail.

Lost and Found

This kachina cult figure, possibly representing a bear shaman, is located in the Piedras Marcadas section of the Petroglyph National Monument on Albuquerque's west side..  Its creation likely dates back about three hundred years.

About six months ago, the bear shaman was lost, not to the world, but to me personally.  I had visited the the image several times since we first moved to Albuquerque in 2008 and photographed it with a couple of my old cameras.  Then, when I decided to revisit the rock art image and photograph  again about six months ago, I was unable to locate it.  I went back a half dozen times, but no luck; the image and its thousand-pound boulder seemed to have evaporated.  Something similar happened to me a couple times in the past twenty years that I have pursued an interest in ancient Southwest rock art.  I'm not sure exactly what goes on in my brain on these occasions; I'm usually pretty good at finding my way, even in unfamiliar or difficult terrain.  I knew the approximate location to within about a half-mile square around the site, but I just could not pin down the precise location.  How I finally relocated the rock art image seems as unlikely now as the image's strange disappearance.

The development of my interest in rock art more or less coincided with the beginning of collecting, restoring and using old film cameras.  One important resource in helping to get my old cameras working was a web site maintained by Rick Oleson who is extraordinarily talented at fixing old film cameras, as well as in illustrating his restorations with photos and drawings.  In addition to consulting Rick's site as needed, I also followed his photographic work on the Flickr photo sharing site.  One day recently, I noted that Rick's photo stream included some familiar looking rock art images.  It turned out that he had made a cross-country trip from his home in Kentucky that included a stop in Albuquerque and a visit to the Petroglyph National Monument.  And there among his images was a picture of the lost bear shaman.  It seemed an extraordinary coincidence.

Photo by Rick Oleson

Fortunately for me Rick's photograph included some important details of the terrain surrounding the rock art figure.  I made a sketch of his image paying particular attention to the profile of the escarpment behind the shaman figure, as well as some other rock art images which could just barely be made out among the jumble of rocks.  I returned to the Piedras Marcadas site with the sketch in my pocket and pretty confident of success, but it actually took me about an hour walking in and out of the several small canyons there to finally locate the shaman.  Perhaps I would have found the figure eventually on my own, but I certainly would never have imagined that I would locate it with the help of Rick Oleson.