Fall Skies

My last roll of Fuji 200.  Lots of processing issues.  I have some Kodak ColorPlus 200 on the way.  I may try some CineStill developer again.

C-41 Roundup

 I'm proceeding with C-41 experimentation with mixed but encouraging results.  This roll of Fuji 200 with my mju was processed for six minutes at 95F.  The shadows lost a little detail, so I may need to add a minute for the next roll.  The good part was that I had to spend very little time stamping out little white spots in the skies.  The lower processing temp does seem to help quite a bit in keeping the emulsion intact.

Albuquerque got some snow last week, but we're now back to 70 deg. temps like much of the Mountain West.

I've spent a lot of time over the years we've lived in Albuquerque at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.  They have frequently hosted very good photo exhibits, and we have enjoyed a lot of films and live performances on the indoor and outdoor stages.  I have also benefitted from the Spanish language course offerings at the Cervantes Institute.

I have not been inspired to take many pictures of the Cultural Center.  The architecture of the main buildings clearly incorporates features from both Native American and Hispanic sources, but it seems to me the architects chose  to focus on aspects of those two cultures which prioritized size and power assertions over functional quality.  

I was pleased to see recently that the Center had inaugurated a new outdoor gallery with the first exhibit being about the architecture of the site.  I thought that perhaps I would gain a new appreciation of the visual appearance of the place that has so far escaped me.  I was disappointed to find that the information presented on metal panels hung on the site's west side fence were more about the history of the site's development than about the architectural features.  Even more distressing is the fact that viewers of the exhibit are slow-moving targets on a very busy bike path.  That is something that can be easily corrected by just flipping the panels so they would be viewable from the safety of the site on the other side of the fence.  Hopefully, that will happen before someone is run down.

I have not got back inside the Albuquerque Art Museum since it reopened recently, but I have made a couple more shots of the museum shop window in an effort to capture some of the interesting colors and reflections.

Walking my mju

The Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) metering system has an uncanny ability to get the exposure right under any condition of lighting.  

This was my fourth roll of color film in my current Unicolor C-41 kit.  I was pleased to see that the kit is mostly performing as it should.  I decided to see how it would work at a lower temperature and longer time, so I processed for six minutes at 95F.  That seemed about right,  so I'm going to stick with that time and temp, adding 2% on the time for each subsequent roll.  The normally recommended developing time of just 3.5 minutes at 102F is a little too short for comfort, and I'm thinking that a lower temp will also be a little gentler on the emulsion.

Chaco

 Chaco was one of our first stops on our way to choosing New Mexico as the place we wanted to live.  We ended up living in southern New Mexico, but we returned to the Canyon every four or five years.  Now, living in Albuquerque, we can get to Chaco in three hours for a day trip.  It is much more satisfying, though, to stay overnight to fully appreciate the spectacular landscape and the unobstructed night skies.

Fajada Butte is visible for many miles on the way into Chaco.  

The long wall at Chetro Ketl is one of the most impressive structures in the canyon.

The circular subterranean kivas were originally roofed with logs hand carried to the site from many miles away.

Doorways throughout the site are all under five feet in height.

Pueblo Bonito is the largest great house in Chaco with 650 rooms.

The aligned doorways in Pueblo Bonito are emphasized by the light from above thanks to missing roofs.  Less obvious is the interesting remnant on this room's wall of the smooth plaster surface which was likely typical of both internal and external walls throughout Chaco.

Each of the great houses at Chaco have different styles of masonry, depending on the number of stories and the time in which they were built over several centuries.  The sandstone walls at Pueblo Bonito feature thin, neatly laid courses.

Flash floods still occasionally course through the arroyo in the canyon's center during the summer rainy season.  Diminished rainfall in the 14th Century may have contributed to the final abandonment of the site by the Ancestral Puebloan people.

Barelas

 All the old cars in Albuquerque showed up in the historic Barelas neighborhood on Saturday for a cruise and curbside show -- restored classics, customs, and low riders.

There were a lot of bystanders and car owners on the sidewalks, so I made just quick passes up and down 4th Street shooting with my Olympus Infinity Stylus.  The little camera's sharp 35mm lens, autofocus and autoexposure easily coped with the picture opportunities and the contrasty late-afternoon lighting.  It was nice to get back to shooting color and the Unicolor kit got the job done for me.

Colores de Quarai

The Quarai site is close up to the south end of the Manzano Mountains, so it catches a little more rain than the other two Salinas Pueblo Missions as the clouds pile up against the mountains.  In mid-July there is a large amount of coyote gourd starting to produce gourds, and the groves of cottonwood and other trees provide a lot of welcome shade.  I suspect the trees were not a prominent feature of the landscape when the pueblo was still populated back in the 17th Century.  People who rely on wood for cooking and warmth cannot usually afford the luxury of ornamental shade trees.

Roxie enjoyed making a couple new friends, and she was especially well-behaved on the leash during our walk through the Quarai site.

This model of the Quarai Mission church and convent was constructed and restored quite a long time ago.  The architectural studies of the Salinas Pueblo Mission sites are also mostly quite old.  Given the present day availability of 3D drawing software it seems like it would be pretty easy to create much more interesting re-creations of the site.  Archaeologists have begun to use drones and 3D software to document sites and their excavation, but not so much for constructing 3D models of the complete structures.

ClipPix ETC

This interesting little cemetery chapel is in Punta de Agua just before the turnoff to Quarai.

Colores de Abó

I shot part of a roll of Fuji 200 in my Pentax Spotmatic at the Abó ruins in the morning and finished it off at Quarai in the afternoon.  Knowing that my C-41 kit was pretty anemic at this point I decided to drop off the film for processing on the way home at the one place in town that still develops color film.

I was a little surprised to find the the local lab's results had all the same deficits as I have been seeing in my own C-41 results at home.  The negatives looked to be one or two stops under-done, and there were quite a few white spots to be stamped out in Photoshop, along with some red stains bleeding in from the spaces between frames.

The Unicolor and Cinestill C-41 kits I use are out of stock at all the on-line sites I have looked at, and that seems to be expected to persist until the Fall.  I have poked around on the net to get some insight on the shortages and quality issues, but have not come up with any explanations.

* * *

Two more from the Abó site.  The little Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim does a nice job of blending the subject and its environment.

Nikon Color

Summer has come early to Albuquerque.  We have eaten a couple of artichokes already from Margaret's garden and more are on the way.

Saturday saw some relaxation of the restrictions imposed by the health emergency in New Mexico.  It looked pretty much like a normal weekend day in the Plaza Vieja, including a few custom classics.

I enjoyed the solidity and simplicity of the Nikon F.  The 1.4/50mm lens that came with the camera is a solid performer.

The Flowers Still Bloom

It was a very fine walk on a brilliant morning, and I easily used up all 36 frames of a roll of Fuji 200. On top of that, in processing the roll with my Unicolor C-41 kit I also came up with solutions to two problems which have plagued my color processing.

The last half dozen rolls of color I have used have been marred by red stains, mostly located in the spaces between frames, but also spilling into the picture area.  The fix for that problem seems to be just increasing the time in the Blix solution from six to eight minutes.

The other problem is a longer term one.  The negative strip was binding up in the plastic reel of the Paterson tank so that I had great difficulty in getting the last six frames or so onto the reel.  Quite often the film strip would kink and badly mar the negative.  I had previously improved the loading of the film onto the reel by completely winding the film back into the cartridge and then removing the film from the cartridge in the dark bag.  That seemed to make the winding on of the film onto the reel go more smoothly at first, but I still ended up most often with difficulties near the end.

So, this time I rewound the film nearly to the end in the camera, but left a little bit of the leader sticking out of cartridge.  I then cut the end the leader so that I had a straight edge at the end and I clipped the corners, providing a very slight taper.  I then put the cartridge into the dark bag and popped the top off with a church key to remove the film which I then loaded onto the reel.  The result was a smooth ride of the film all the way to the end.

I concluded that the film loading problem was due to the film wobbling slightly as it travels along the groves in the plastic reel and the sharp corners catching in the partitions along the course of the grooves.  I tested that idea by running a short length of film all through the reel and observed that the film did jam, but could be freed by jiggling the film or the reel a bit.

Another thing I have been doing for a while now is paying attention to the instructions which came along with the CineStill processing kit I used just one time; they are much more detailed than the Unicolor kit.  The CineStill instructions advise adding two percent to the processing time for each roll of film processed in the reusable chemicals.  Both Unicolor and CineStill say that eight rolls per kit is the limit, but my experience has been that you can get at least twice that.  The CineStill kit also has detailed instructions for push, pull and variable temperature processing.

Shut Down

The Minolta X-700 given to me by a friend recently came mounted with a Vivitar 2.8/35-70 zoom.  It doesn't seem a very versatile range for a zoom, but I thought I at least ought to give it a try.  The pictures from it look ok, so maybe I'll find a use for it.

The dog and I took a walk into Old Town last Saturday.  At 3:00 in the afternoon, the stores were closed and the streets empty.  Normally, the area under the covered walk would be full of jewelry vendors and their tourist clients.  I've shot the red chairs empty of diners before early in the morning before the restaurant was open.

Though there was no one around to appreciate it other than me, a fine old Oldsmobile was parked at the curb in front of the church.  I didn't see the owner.

We try to get out to the river with the dog a couple times a week.  This is one of the locations where there is a big sandbar where the dog can get in a run.

We have mostly stayed close to home this week.  That doesn't suit the dog, but the cat is fine with the current arrangement.