Autumn Comes to the River

 Late summer rain caused a burst of growth in the riverside forest and cooler weather has brought some color to the foliage.  Trails beside the river are muddy and there are big white mushrooms growing everywhere -- something I had not seen here before.

I shot a roll of expired Fuji 400 at 200 in my Nikon F with the Nikkor 1.8/50mm lens.  This was the 12th roll through my current Cinestill C-41 kit.  I developed for seven minutes at 95 degrees.

I heard a few Sandhill Cranes during my walk, so I'll get back to the river soon to try for some pictures of them.  I managed to clean the fungus off the front elements in a Vivitar 70-210 zoom which was given to me some time ago, and am looking forward to seeing how that performs.

A Morning at the Zoo

 I was one of the first visitors through the gate of the Rio Grande Zoo on Friday morning.  I was alone for much of the hour circuit of the exhibits.  As it turned out, there were also few animals to be seen as most had yet to be let into their outdoor spaces.  I decided to head back toward the exit by way of the Africa section and found to my delight that the hippos and their month-old baby were in the pond.

I think it has been determined that the baby is a female.  I believe that she weighed about fifty pounds at birth.  She is playful and active and seems completely comfortable in her aquatic environment.  While I watched, the mother several times swam under the bridge over the pond, and there was a good deal of thrashing and bellowing underneath as she was apparently letting the big male know that he was expected to remain in the small section of the pond well away from the little one.

The cheetah's enclosure is near the hippos and they were also active, possibly inspired by the cool morning air.

I gave the expired Fuji 400 an extra stop of exposure and some extra time in the Cinestill C-41 to compensate for the film's age and the fact that this was the 13th roll through this processing kit.  The aperture-priority automation of the Pentax ME makes it a very pleasant camera to shoot; all these shots were made with the SMC Pentax-A f/2.8 135mm lens.

The camera's well-placed controls, bayonet lens mount and compactness makes it a quick shooter.  To appreciate the small size of this advanced slr it is worthwhile to compare it to my Leica IIIa; the body dimensions are nearly equal.  Of course, that is a tribute to the pioneering Barnack design,  as well as to the Japanese innovators who brought the 35mm format into the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

An American Favorite

The Universal Mercury II CX has always seemed to me to be one of the most interesting camera designs produced in the U.S.  or anywhere.

The half-frame format was uncommon at the time, the rotary shutter was rugged and accurate up to 1/1000, the coated Tricor lens was sharp, and the price was very competitive.  In spite of those unique qualities, the camera today is frequently the target of derision on photography forums.  The criticisms seem to come most often from people with little or no actual experience with the camera.  While I sometimes feel a slight urge to post responses to some of those opinions, it always seems more worthwhile to just go out and make some pictures with the camera.  These latest were made on a recent outing to Albuquerque's Rio Grande Zoo.

The film was some well-expired Fuji 400, the twelfth roll processed in my current batch of Cinestill C-41.

Multitasking with the VUWS

The small size and light weight of the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim (vuws) camera makes it easy to carry.  It often rides along in my shirt pocket, even when I am out mainly to shoot with another of my cameras.  The result is that the roll of film in the vuws often ends up with a grab-bag of photos and several story lines.  My last roll of film, some expired Fuji color, included walks through the neighborhood and a couple trips to the Rio Grande.

Our near-downtown neighborhood has undergone a lot of changes since we moved here about thirteen years ago, mostly in the direction of gentrification.  Quite a few old working-class homes have been torn down and replaced with upscale two-storied block houses.  The same fate has befallen local commercial buildings, though a few are being renovated and repurposed like this one at 6th St. and Mountain Ave.

The old door and windows are mostly sealed, to what purpose I don't know at present.  The interesting thing I noted, however, is that stripping off an outer layer revealed an old painted identity, Farmer Brothers Coffee.  My first thought was that the building had housed a long-gone coffee shop.  Consulting google maps, however, I saw what looks like the new home of Farmer Brothers Coffee across town, and the description of the site as an importer, manufacturer and wholesale/retail seller of coffee, tea and other food items.  I might have figured that out without google if I had not been buying just one brand of coffee for the last two decades.  So, anyway, I went to the company's website and found a very nicely produced five-minute video history made to celebrate the company's one hundredth anniversary.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the roll of film was taken up with my frequent visits to the Rio Grande and its bordering cottonwood forest, known locally as The Bosque.  This time of year the main attraction for us is the marvelous blooming of the Yerba Mansa which covers acres of the riverside forest south of the Hispanic Cultural Center.  The shaded setting is a bit of a challenge for the fixed-aperture camera, but the wide exposure latitude of the color film keeps picture harvesting a viable possibility.

For our dog, Roxy, the flowers hold little interest.  For her, splashing in the shallows of the river is her greatest joy in life.  

New Mexicans optimistically refer to their rainy season as The Monsoon.  That has been a bit of a stretch with a historic average yearly rainfall of around ten inches.  Now, even those ten inches are getting hard to come by and the state is in a long term period of drought.  In fact, the possibility has been raised that the river at Albuquerque could run dry this year; something I believe that no one now alive has seen.  Of course, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to weather.  The reality is that the amplitude of the extremes has heightened with climate change.  Two years ago the Rio Grande, swollen with some sudden rains and snowpack runoff, overflowed its banks and turned bosque paths into swift moving streams.  This year those floods are a dim memory as sandbars crowd the river channel.  We'll find some water for Roxy to indulge her passion, but it may not be in the Rio Grande.

Like New

I decided to try some of the expired color film I recently acquired.  I am not usually optimistic about the chances of getting predictable results from old color film, but this Fuji 400 was only a few years past its expiration date and it had been in frozen storage.  I loaded the roll into my Spotmatic SP, made a few shots on a walk in the Sandia Mountains, and then finished up with a morning stroll around our neighborhood.

I processed the film in Cinestill C-41 for six minutes at 95C and can't see any issues with the pictures attributable to the film's age.  I have one more roll of the Fuji, and several of Kodak Gold which is considerably older, but it has also been properly stored.

No film test of course is complete without a picture of the cat.

Color Chemistry

I've been using the Unicolor C-41 kit from Freestyle for quite a while and have been very satisfied with it.  When I went to order a new supply, however, I found it was on back order.  So, I decided to give the CineStill kit a try.  The price was not much different and the instructions for use seemed very similar to those of Unicolor.  The CineStill liquid components are quite a bit easier to mix.  The results seemed very similar to what I was used to with the Unicolor product.

In addition to the somewhat easier preparation of the liquid components, the CineStill kit includes some useful information on push/pull processing and variable temperature development.  The information packet also suggests that developing time should be increased by 2% for each roll of film developed.  With that in mind I've made myself a little developing time chart to follow as I use the kit.  I've been able to get quite a few more uses from the Unicolor kit than is recommended, so I'll be interested in seeing if the CineStill kit performs as well in that regard.

I see in visiting the CineStill site now that the C-41 kit is now on backorder there as well as at the Freestyle site, and the Unicolor kit is presently unavailable as well.  A bit of a mystery.

Fall

This is always the best time of the year in the Southwest.  The tourists have gone back to their own reality, allowing the natural rhythms of the days and seasons to reemerge.

The Sandhill Cranes reappear in the open spaces around the city  as the harvest is underway. By the end of November they will congregate in the shorn fields by the hundreds.

Mornings in the city are cool and quiet, welcoming to walkers, cyclists and the small ceremonies and rituals of daily life.

Shooting Balloons

My strategy for making pictures during the Balloon Fiesta is to have a couple cameras loaded and ready to go, and then to wait for a balloon to fly over my house.  That has actually worked out pretty well in the nine years we have lived in Albuquerque.

The strategy is helped out by a neighborhood early warning system consisting of all the local dogs who start a chorus of barking as soon as the balloons come in sight.  If the windows are open, you can also hear overhead what sounds like loud, heavy breathing as the pilots pulse their burners to stay airborne.

Most of my pictures so far during this year's Fiesta have been made with my Yashinon f4.5 zoom lens which has a range of 75-230mm.  It it an old lens, so pretty long and heavy, but it is sharp and handy for lots of public events where you cannot always control your positioning and perspective.

Afternoon entertainment is scheduled daily in Old Town throughout the nine days of the Balloon Fiesta.  Students from the International Institute of Flamenco performed in the gazebo at the Plaza Vieja on Tuesday.  I got there late and found myself about 50 feet from the action, so was glad to have the zoom mounted on my Spotmatic SP.  The light filtering into the gazebo through the trees was impossible to meter, so I just set the lens to f8 and shot until I got to the end of the roll.

my new pony

This is the ebay seller's picture which sold me on a new Kodak Pony 828.  On the far right you can see that the little tab on the latch is intact.  He also said everything was working fine on the camera, and even posted some pictures made with it.

I was the only bidder and paid $5 for the camera and another $5 for shipping.  I cleaned the inside of the viewfinder, but nothing else was needed.

The pictures on the first roll of Fuji 400 included our yearly visit to see the Yerba Mansa blooming near the Rio Grande south of the National Hispanic Cultural Center.  The blossoms are especially tall and plentiful this year thanks to the river's high water.  We also found and enjoyed large amounts of mulberries and wolf berries.  The dog had a blast racing through the cottonwood forest.