Looking at Art in New Mexico

 Margaret and I spent a lot of time in galleries and museums in the last month.  The exhibition of Canadian Indigenous Art at the Albuquerque Art Museum was excellent.  A show of Black and White drawings and photographs at the New Mexico Art League was great fun.  

Margaret at Arts Thrive

Two exhibitions with great promise mostly brought disappointment.  The annual Arts Thrive benefit exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum had way too much art on the walls.  The Ways of Seeing exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe assembled classics from three private photography collections, but what might have been a great experience was ruined for me by abysmal lighting.  

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

 At the Santa Fe exhibit there were prints from many of Photography's great pioneers including Alfred Steiglitz and Ruth Berhard.  Gertrude Kasebier's small photogravure, "Blessed are thou amongst women", was so poorly lit that I was left wishing I had brought a flashlight.  In fact, all the galleries in the great old Santa Fe building  were dim and dingy looking.  The big palladium prints by David Michael Kennedy at least showed that there is still good work being done today in the State.

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.)

5222

 I retrieved some Kodak Double-X(5222) of unknown age from my refrigerator drawer and shot it in my Olympus XA. I started the roll on a walk by the river and finished it up at the Albuquerque Art Museum where there was a landscape exhibit including some big camera obscura works by Shi Guorui.

I shot the roll at ASA100 and processed the film in hc110b for 6 minutes.  The negative density and the grain looked good, but the gray tones were kind of muddy.  I probably would have been better off shooting at box speed and allowing less time in the developer.  The real expert in 5222 is jon caradies who shoots that film almost exclusively and processes it in D-23.

My little Olympus XA has an excellent lens and it works fine in bright outside light, but the dim rangefinder makes low light shooting a frustrating experience.  

Nikon F

I picked up this Nikon F recently from Craigslist at a price good enough to where I could justify the purchase just for the plain eyelevel finder which I wanted to use on my F2.

As it turns out, the camera is in mechanically perfect condition sixty years after it was made.  I never thought I would have one, so I'm thrilled at the possibility of actually putting it to use.  I ran a quick test roll of Arista.Edu through the camera to verify my initial impressions.

Margaret has always had amazing hair.

Cate has turned eleven.

More to come.