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

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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.

La Quinta

 Thanks to my friend, Bob Eggers, I recently enjoyed a bike tour of the Los Poblanos ranch.  I had visited the restaurant at Los Poblanos several times before, but was unaware of the extent of the property and its interesting history and architecture.  La Quinta is the name given to this building adjacent to the main ranch house which was designed expressly for large meetings and cultural events.  The architect was John Gaw Meem, famous for his Pueblo Revival and Territorial Revival designs.  

These pictures were shot on expired Kodak Gold 200 in my little point-and-shoot Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim (vuws).  Perhaps not the camera one first considers when talking about architectural photography, but  the two-element 22mm lens is surprisingly sharp and produces wide views with little apparent distortion.

I had some previous familiarity with Meems' work as a result of many hours of walking around the UNM campus where there are twenty-five buildings designed by him, most in the Pueblo Revival style. He regarded the Zimmerman Library as his crowning achievement.  The Library has been the subject for many of my old cameras including the Ansco Folding Buster Brown and the KW Patent Etui.

Another Balloon Fiesta

The Fiftieth in fact.  A couple flew over my house, and that would have been enough for me having photographed about fifteen instances of the yearly event.

I turned out that some friends wanted to chase down some balloons the next day, so we hopped into the car and headed north toward the launch site.  To my surprise we encountered little traffic and ended up finding an ideal viewing location a mile south of the Balloon Museum.  I got a few pictures with both the Pentax ME Super using Kentmere 400 and the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim loaded with outdated Kodak ColorPlus 200.

At noon on the same day I went down to the Plaza Vieja to catch my favorite part of the Balloon Fiesta, the performance of the Flamenco dancers from Albuquerque's International School of Flamenco.  At the balloon viewing site the Pentax ME Super had developed a problem with the film advance, and that only got worse when I tried to use it to shoot some pictures of the dancers.

It was only when I developed the film from the Pentax that I could see the main problem was that the shutter was often firing at the end of the advance stroke, producing a variety of unexpected results.  I made a few shots with the vuws of the dancers preparing to perform, but was disappointed I could not catch the dancers performing under the shade of the gazebo.

A Google search showed that film advance problems are not uncommon in the ME Super.  I'll open up the camera to see if it looks fixable, though I don't think I would trust it again for critical work.  Fortunately, I also have a Pentax ME which seems to be working fine, and I'm not exactly lacking in other options.

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As often happens, Margaret got the best shot of the day with her cellphone camera:

Time Travel

 After finishing the twelve black and white shots in the Argoflex Forty I made another circuit of the Albuquerque Museum car show with my Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) loaded with Kodak Gold 200.  The little Olympus has a lot to recommend it for such events.  It is easily slipped in a pocket.  The 35mm lens is very sharp.  The auto-focus and auto-exposure seldom miss their mark.

The two-block walk back to my car found me two classics in the wild, a T-Bird and a Lotus.