Kentmere 200

 I loaded a roll of Kentmere 200 in the Leica IIIa and went to Old Town close to noon on Friday. The old cars were lined up on the shady side of the street in front of San Felipe de Neri church.  The owners sat in folding chairs along the sidewalk.

Afterward I walked around the Old Town streets to grab a few hip shots before stopping for lunch at the Tiny Grocer just off Old Town Road.

I thought the results from the new Kentmere looked pretty good.  Still, there are so many variables in shooting any film that it is not a good idea to jump to conclusions without shooting several rolls under a variety of conditions.  I have another roll which I'll try to get to soon with the Nikon S.

Saturday in Old Town

 We enjoyed an afternoon performance by the Spanish Broom group on the patio of the Tiny Grocer cafe.

At One (point five)

 

Old Town

 I have been walking around Old Town with my cameras since we moved to Albuquerque about sixteen years ago.  A lot of little shops have come and gone in that time, but the character of the place has largely endured.

Broken Boxes

 The large fabric and metal sculpture near the entrance to the current exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum drew a lot of favorable attention from visitors.  All of the pieces exhibited were expertly crafted, though their meaning  and relatability  often seemed obscure to me.

 I first photographed the mother wolf figure with the Elmar 3.5/50 lens on my Leica IIIa.  I thought the resultant image on Kentmere 400 was quite good.  However, I wanted to better show the large scale of the piece, so I went back on another day with the Jupiter 12 2.8/35mm.  That did give me some images that better illustrated the liveliness and the context and proportionality compared to human dimensions.  The very low light level made it a challenging undertaking.

 The "Broken Boxes" title of the exhibit came from a podcast consisting of ten years of interviews with artists, including those in the current exhibition.  Even after reading some of the explanations on site, the show title still required some clarification for me.  A friend who is a docent at the museum suggested that the title terms could be similar to the concept of "out of the box" as the artists were all indigenous and were challenging prevalent ideas about their cultures.

The artists that created the wolf sculpture are Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt.

Encounters in Old Town

 The first thing I noticed strolling into the Plaza Vieja on Friday morning was some very loud music and this dog sitting beside the gazebo.  The vest indicated he was a service dog and it appeared one of his service talents was musical appreciation.

I stopped to pet the dog, and got talking with his owner who was wielding the highly amplified guitar.  I learned the dog's name was Papito, and his real mission in life was the pursuit of the cloth frisbee seen lying in the shadow to the lower right.  I tossed the frisbee as instructed and it was clear that this was an activity with unlimited possibilities.

Papito's owner related a bit of his life story, including an addiction to gambling which had resulted in a recent large loss and some thought of putting out his hat next to the gazebo for some grocery money.  I snapped a quick shot up through the railing of the gazebo and then walked past a funeral in progress at San Felipe de Neri and on to Church Street.  

I heard my name called and there was our friend, Mary, with her four sisters from Silver City, mid-way through their own Old Town stroll.  It seemed an extraordinary event.  I had not recalled that she had mentioned coming from such a large family of sisters.  They must have been a phenomenon while growing up in that little New Mexico town.

Old Town Shadows

 A brilliant Spring morning created some new perspectives on familiar subjects around the Plaza Vieja.

The Leica IIIa and the 3.5/50 Elmar performed well as expected, but the combination of Kentmere 100 and HC110b made me work a bit harder in Silverfast and Photoshop to get the middle gray tones I wanted.

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This post was provided courtesy of Windows XP.  I flipped my old Dell desktop on its head a couple times.  Once upright again it started up and performed normally.  I'm thinking the good outcome indicated a loose connection somewhere, but maybe it was just the threat of further violence.

Full-Frame

 I shot some Arista 200 in the Leica IIIa with the Elmar 3.5/50mm for the purpose of comparison with the images I have been getting from my half-frame Olympus Pen-FT.  At the size I normally show on-screen I think there is little difference, but at larger sizes the full-frame images from the Leica do show some better sharpness and finer grain which allow considerably more enlargement.

On a bike ride along the Bosque trail north of Central Ave. I came across the firetruck and a group of firefighter recruits being trained in the use of portable pumps for fighting fires in the riverside forest.

Some cloudy days are bringing nice light to both Old Town and the Bosque.

 

(The chromework on the Harley suggests that some care should be exercised in getting on and off the bike.)

Film Wasting

 An ill spent couple of hours in Old Town.  Nice overcast light.  A camera and lens that have always made nice pictures for me.  I'm tempted to blame the results on the film having gone through at least two airport x-ray scans.  More probably, I was just careless with my shooting technique.  

I nearly always get home with a couple shots left on the roll in the camera.  Very often they turn out to be the frames I like best.  (I know I said the same thing yesterday, but it seemed like something worth repeating.)