Thursday morning found us eating a breakfast of blue corn pancakes at Bike In Coffee. I made a few digital shots for the color and used my half-frame Olympus Pen FT for black & white.
From the Olympus Pen-FT
I always enjoy the yearly Albuquerque Museum car show, but it is exhausting to walk up and down those long rows of closely packed cars, and the acres of chrome is blinding and often defeats my cameras. I'm more comfortable photographing the cars in their natural curbside environment.
These are the results from two sessions including a stroll in the riverside forest and a walk in our side yard garden to portray Margaret's prolific artichokes.
We enjoyed a flamenco performance in Old Town's Plaza Don Luis by the Spanish Broom group on Saturday. The dancers, singers and guitarists all performed at a high level of skill. They will do another performance at the Casa Rondeña Winery on October 6th and will be back in Plaza Don Luis on the 10th. The informal setting of the little plaza combined with the excellent skills on display lent a note of authenticity to the event.
Photographing the action was quite a challenge due to the group's highly kinetic style; they are seldom still for even a moment.
I shot the pictures with both the normal and telephoto lenses for my Olympus Pen FT half-frame camera. The film was some slightly outdated Acros 400 shared with me by fellow film enthusiast, Jim Grey. His work with the film looked quite a bit better than mine, possibly because of the choice of developers. I used the same PMK Pyro I normally use with Kentmere, and at the same time and temperature. I think I'll try some HC110 for the next roll.
Update:
Margaret recorded a short video of the Old Town performance of Spanish Broom.
Some media attention has been given lately to the discovery and dating of the preserved footprints of humans and extinct animals in the dry bed of an ancient lake in White Sands National Monument. The DNA of pollen associated with the prints suggests an age of twenty thousand years. That puts the arrival of humans in the New World much further back in time than previously thought. It also means that the humans were coexisting with some fearsome large predators including Saber-toothed Cats and Dire Wolves.
The Yerba Mansa has bloomed along the Rio Grande a little earlier than usual this year, perhaps because of the unusually warm weather and high water.
From a 2009 blog post:
I first encountered Yerba Mansa in a little bog between the road and the Rio Grande about twenty miles north of Las Cruces. The photo of the flower was made on June 9, 2002 using a little 1.3 megapixel OLYMPUS D360-L. A lot of water has flowed down the river since then.
So my initial knowledge of the plant coincided with the beginning of digital photography. Since I made that first picture with the simple little Olympus D360 I have photographed the plant nearly every year since with many of my old film cameras.
Modern medicine has not found a useful remedy in the Yerba Mansa, but many Native American peoples used all parts of the plant to treat every imaginable ailment. I'm thinking perhaps I'll try it this year in a tea.
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.
The f2/38mm lens on the Pen-FT continues to impress me with its performance in a wide variety of situations.
I met three of my fellow film photographers for coffee at a shop on Central in Albuquerque. The half-frame vertical format encourages this kind of composite of adjacent frames.
I've shot about ten rolls of Kentmere in the Olympus Pen-FT now, and it and the fine F.Zuiko lens have performed faultlessly. I am, however, hearing some faint grumbling comments coming from the cabinet holding my other old cameras about neglect. I'm out of 35mm film at the moment, but I have quite a pile of Kentmere and Fomapan 120 in the refrigerator's film drawer, so there is likely some medium format in my near future.
I've run into a bump in the road regarding film scanning. My ancient Dell computer running XT is again refusing to boot up. That means I have lost access to my favored Silverfast for scanning and Photoshop CS2 for editing. The pictures in this post were done with VueScan and Gimp on my old IMAC. The results aren't awful, but it takes me a lot more time and effort to get to images I consider acceptable.
and some other stuff.
I saw some nice work on the Facebook Pen-F group done on Kentmere processed in Ilfosol 3. I wanted to see how that combination compared to what I get with developing in PMK Pyro. I thought the results weren't bad, but they don't seem to me to be quite as nice in regard to tonality and fine grain. I'm thinking I may try the Ilfosol 3 with some medium format Fomapan next.
