Travelling with the Kiev IIa

 I loaded some Kentmere 400 in the Kiev IIa mounted with the Jupiter-12 35mm lens and rode my trike to Old Town.  As I was preparing to make some shots of the houses on Old Town Road these bikers rode into the frame.

The Plaza Vieja was jammed full of people in town for the first day of the Balloon Fiesta, so I just drove on through to the corner of the Museum.  The current exhibit is an extraordinary opportunity to see works seldom available in Albuquerque, and the message of the show is clearly relevant to our time.

Having got through just a few shots on the roll I took the camera along on our two-day trip to Las Cruces and Mesilla, where we walked around the Plaza on Sunday morning just as the Sunday service was ending at San Albino.

We had coffee in the shop next to the church and I made a few shots around the Plaza as I do on each visit.  I shot rather carelessly as it was a roll of 36.  However, the advance locked just past 20.  

When I developed the film the frames were spaced very narrowly and there was a light leak evident in the margins of a few frames.  Those are issues easily fixed, so I'll get to that before using the Kiev IIa again.

South

We spent four days visiting family and friends in Las Cruces.  I managed to fit in a couple of hours in the Organ Mountains and a morning walk in Old Mesilla.

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.

Mesilla

A two-day stay in Las Cruces allowed a morning visit to the nearby community of Mesilla where I often walked with my old cameras when we lived in southern New Mexico.

The surrounding farm land has largely been taken over by ostentatious mansions surrounded by token groves of pecan trees, but the area around the old town plaza still retains much of its charm from centuries past.

I was pleased to get a roll of film through my Yashica-Mat with no difficulty.   The last time I had tried using it in Chaco Canyon, the camera' shutter and advance locked up on the first frame.  That turned out to be nothing more than operator error.

I had noted a problem with the film advance and had cranked the advance lever and fired the shutter numerous times trying to figure out what was going on.  Some subsequent web searching revealed that you should not crank the camera and fire the shutter with an empty reel in the camera's take-up side.  Fortunately, I had not forced the crank in trying to clear the problem.  I removed the empty reel and cranked and fired the shutter a few times.  Then, I was able to insert a test roll of film and work my way through it with no difficulty.

San Albino

dieciséis de septiembre

Mexican Independence Day brings out the folklórico and flamenco dancers in the plaza of Mesilla, New Mexico.