Abó

The Abó pueblo and mission ruins are part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument about an hour south of Albuquerque.  The Spanish invaders took control of the Tanoan pueblo in the 17th Century and built the church.  The site was abandoned after about fifty years due to drought and  Apache raids.

These pictures were made on my last roll of Acros which I processed in Rodinal 1:50.  The camera was my Kodak Reflex II.

The challenge in photographing these ruins is to get something that looks different from the many thousands of pictures which have been made of the sites in the past.  There was also a large crew at Abó working on stabilizing the ruins.

The photographer pictured making a shot with a fine 4x5 is Joe Van Cleave.

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

I recently found this little chapel on the north side of Albuquerque along with a small cemetery across the street.  It seemed a good subject for my Brownie Hawkeye Flash.

     Muestra de muerte, 

     espíritu de vida,

     aquí cuerpo yace,

     con su alma ida.

         - Nasario García

I see I am a bit out of practice with my box brownie.  You really can't get closer than eight feet with the unmodified camera.  With the No.13 close-up attachment the minimum distance is down to 3.5 feet.  I tried a yellow filter on a couple shots, but that gave me a bit too much contrast for the Acros which I processed in Rodinal 1:50.  Still, the effort seemed a useful exercise.  I think I'll go back with my BHF that has the lens flipped, and maybe try some fp4.

Balloon Fiesta 2019

The first day of this year's Ballon Fiesta got fogged in, but both weekend days saw impressive mass ascensions.  When the balloons are back on the ground everyone heads into Old Town for the rest of the day.  I walked around the Plaza Vieja with my Voigtlander Brilliant.

Most of my shots had bad light leaks.  When I looked closely at the camera later I could see that there is a dent at the edge of the back that is letting in the light.  I think I covered that the last time I shot the camera with some black tape, but it has been over a year since I last used the camera, and I forgot about the leak.  I'll try to do another roll soon with the leak stopped up.  I really like the little Brilliant as its images are always surprisingly sharp and the brilliant finder makes shooting the camera a real treat.

Plate Cameras

My plate cameras are awkward to use compared to just about anything else in my collection.  There is a lot of guesswork in framing an image with either the wire frame or the little reflex finders.  For precise focus and framing you need to mount the camera on a tripod to use the ground glass back, and then switch that out with the film holder to make the exposure.  I don't use the plate cameras with enough regularity to get comfortable with their peculiarities.  Still, I find myself getting around to using them because of the unique character of the images they produce.

The Bentzin Primar is my favorite among my plate cameras because of its compactness and sturdy construction.  The old Compur shutter is simple and reliable.  The uncoated Tessar lens is very sharp, though it tends to flare a bit if brought too close to the sun.

I took the Primar to the botanic garden late in the morning. The Rada film back was loaded with one of my last rolls of Fuji Acros.  The first shot of the figures at the base of the fountain was made in the shade of some big trees with the aperture wide open at f4.5.

I developed the Acros semi-stand in Rodinal at 1:100 dilution for 45 minutes with 30 seconds initial agitation and two inversions after 20 minutes.

I'm going to stick with the Bentzin Primar for a while.  I think I'll use a roll of TMAX 400 for the next session to give myself a better chance of getting the focus and exposure right.

The Church of Ansel

We spent a couple days in Taos.  I've been there several times over the years we have lived in New Mexico, but I've never taken the time before to explore the place with my cameras.  I decided on this occasion that I would devote a chunk of time to one subject, the San Francisco de Asis church south of town.  Ansel Adams and Paul Strand immortalized the place early in the last century.  It seemed a nice opportunity to see what they saw and to develop some appreciation of how they approached the subject and how they interpreted it.

The first thing that struck me was that the church is a lot smaller than it appears in the pictures made by Adams and Strand.  They both used large format cameras that allowed them a lot of control over surface textures, depth of focus and perspective.  Their results may seem deceptive today, but it is also possible to argue that emphasizing a kind of monumentality in their portrayals was true to the impression people would have had of the structure when it was built two centuries ago.  My own pictures of the place were made with a relatively simple box camera with few controls, and partly for that reason they reflect a more contemporary and ephemeral view of the site.

I started taking pictures of the church at 6:00 AM when the sun was low and not yet too bright.  That favored the estimated focus, the two apertures, and the shutter that is limited to 1/25 or 1/50 sec. in the Vredeborch Felica box camera.

After I exposed the twelve frames available on the roll of 120 Fuji Acros rollfilm in the Felica I switched to shooting Arista Ultra Edu 100 in my Pentax ME, mostly using the 28mm f2.8 SMC Pentax M.  The final portion of the two hours I spent at the church were given over to shooting Kodak ColorPlus 200 in my Olympus Infinity Stylus.  It will be interesting to compare the results from those two cameras to what came from the Felica box.  Of course, the light later in the morning was very different, and there were some additional characters on the set including several cats and one devout parishioner.

Coincidentally, the day after we got home, the Albuquerque Art Museum offered a morning screening of the PBS biography of Ansel Adams made some years ago, I think.  It was worth watching, mostly because of the brilliant commentary by John Szarkowski.  Photographers watching the film will grit their teeth during the constant zooming and panning of Ansel's images by the cinematographers.

Goodbye to Old Friends

Not these two.  They're in good shape and sticking around.

Those were the only shots I liked out of a roll of 12 shots from my Brownie Hawkeye Flash box camera.  The rest were shot outdoors in mostly sunny conditions, but they looked underexposed by one to three stops.  That is an unlikely outcome with any box camera loaded with 100-speed film as such conditions should actually result in slight overexposure.  

Here is the problem:

I'm not sure how long that bottle of Rodinal has been sitting in my refrigerator.  It could be six or eight years.  Acros and Rodinal has long been a favorite of mine for medium format work, but it looks like the end of the line for this combination.  Fuji has stopped making Acros.  I still have a few rolls left, but anything left out there is going to be prohibitively priced from here on in, and I'm going to move on.  I could get a replacement bottle of Rodinal easily enough, but I think I'm better off using a couple other developers that I like including PMK Pyro and HC-110, both of which also have good shelf life.

The reason the two portrait negatives were closer to appropriate density is that I braced the camera on a tripod and shot with a cable release with a best-guess exposure in the neighborhood of a quarter second.  So, the modified BHF got the job done well enough.

Once I've used up my last rolls of Acros I'll likely shoot TMAX 100 in my simple cameras most often.  There are plenty of other choices still available, though, so still some room for experimentation.

I find myself also dealing with some other changes in the way I handle film.  I recently refurbished an IMAC by cleaning it up and adding some memory.  The computer has a very nice 21-inch display and it seems about as fast and responsive as my laptops running Windows 7, Window 10 and Linux Mint.  I'm using the IMAC now for most of my on line activity, so that means I only have to turn on my old Windows XP desktop to scan negatives using PhotoShop and SilverFast.  Down the line I'll probably have to look for a scanner and some software compatible with the IMAC.  I'm currently taking a stab at learning to use the free GIMP photo editing program, but it has what seems like a nearly impenetrable user interface.  Such is life, I guess.

Return To Sender

I tried to give away this Genos Rapid three times, but it kept coming back.

Acros in the Kodak Reflex II

I got the lenses back on the Reflex II and then took a walk in the neighborhood to catch the remains of the last snow storm.

I mostly shoot 400 speed film with my medium format cameras, but I really like the Acros/Rodinal combination.

The close-ups I did with the camera were a little soft, so I'll need to try again to adjust the focus properly.  I think I'll likely go all the way with cleaning and adjusting as the Reflex II is really pretty easy to work on compared to most twin lens reflex cameras.  I just used the ruby window on this occasion for advancing the film, but it is faster and safer to let the camera handle the spacing when things are working right.

An Argus Day

Saturday was proclaimed to be a day to celebrate the Argus cameras.

I used my Argoflex Forty to honor the day along with one of the last rolls of Fuji Acros that I'm likely to shoot.  I'm not sure how 8/18/18 figures into the equation, but it seems as good a day as any to recognize the often-underrated line of American industry.

I chose to develop the Acros in Rodinal which has always been my favorite combination.  The negatives seemed a little thin, possibly due to the fact that the bottle has probably spent about five years in the refrigerator.

The Argoflex Forty has been a very reliable performer for me over the years, producing images that look as good to me as those coming from much more sophisticated and expensive cameras.

I've also been happy with the pictures I've gotten from my other Argus cameras, including the C-3 and the Argus A cameras.  I'll try to get back to doing something with them again too.

Beach People