Power To The People

Mesilla

We spent a few days visiting with friends and family in Las Cruces.  Our motel was close to the little town of Mesilla, so it just took a couple minutes to drive there on a Friday morning to visit the plaza and shoot a roll of film in my Brownie Hawkeye Flash.

The town clings tenaciously to its past; things change, but more slowly than in most places.  The economy is still closely attached to the land, and traveling south or west quickly brings visitors to fields of onions and vast pecan orchards irrigated only with ground water.  The Rio Grande is mostly dry long before it gets to Mesilla; the acequias that run through town contain only sand.

The Kodak Tri-X Pan Professional film I shot in Mesilla was rated at ISO 320; that would be a bit fast for a sunny day in the Brownie Hawkeye Flash, but it seemed like the twenty-seven years beyond the expiration date would likely have tempered the sensitivity of the film sufficiently to allow use in the old box camera.  I processed the film as recommended in the data sheet in the film box and I thought the results were pretty good.

Tri-X Prof (TXP) 07/1994

 I shot a roll of Tri-X Prof (TXP) in my Mamiya C330.  The expiration date on the 320 ASA film was an intimidating 07/1994, but it had been frozen. I gave the film a little extra exposure and a little more time in the developer and it performed very well.  My handling and processing, however, left something to be desired.  I lost a couple frames to poor loading onto the reel and also saw some light leak damage in some of the pictures.  The tonal values and grain were very nice in the surviving frames.

Plaza Don Luis

Plaza Vieja

I have four more rolls of this old Tri-X.  I'll try to be more careful with the processing, and I'm thinking it will be interesting to try some portraits to take advantage of the unique character of this film.

Nikon FG-20

 The Nikon FG-20, dating from 1984, is compact and light-weight like the Nikon EM which preceded it.  While the FG-20 shares many features with the EM it has a full range of manually selectable shutter speeds in addition to an auto-mode for the electronic shutter.  Like the EM, the relatively inexpensive FG-20 will allow use of most of the great bayonet-mount lenses made for the earlier F-Series cameras.

The Nikon FG-20 does not offer the smooth precision in operation of the earlier pro-line F cameras, but it is rugged and reliable.  The previous owner of this example bought the camera used in the 1980s and shot it well into the '90s.  It then sat in in a camera bag unused for about twenty years.  When I got the camera, I removed the two long-dead batteries, installed new ones and the camera came to life and seems to be operating nearly like new.

The Nikon FG-20 came to me in its original big camera bag along with a full set of accessories including documentation, filters, electronic flash and a motor winder.  There was also a 2.8/28mm Zykor MC Auto lens and a Vivitar Series 1, 3.5/70-210mm Macro Focusing Zoom which focuses down to four feet.  There is some fungus creeping in from the periphery of the Zoom's front lens; it doesn't look like that is affecting image quality at present, but it would be nice to get it removed before it gets any further.  The motor winder had some ancient corroded batteries left inside and is not currently functional.  I likely won't get around to using the flash or the winder, even if I can get them working.

Verichrome Pan - Roll 2

 This roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan was also fifty years beyond its expiration date.  I processed in LegacyPro L110b (1:31) for six minutes at 20C.  The density seemed a bit better than the previous roll which had been processed semi-stand in Rodinal 1:100 for 50 minutes.

The camera for this roll was my Ilford Sporti, a Cold War relic "Made in Western Germany".  It features zone focusing and just two aperture choices, Sunny and Cloudy.  The single speed shutter looks to be operating at about 1/30.