Tucson

 We will be in Phoenix at the beginning of February, so I may get down  to this WPHS event in Tucson which I have thought about attending for many years.

I have often made the drive down to Tucson in the past to visit two favorite places there.  My cameras have accompanied me on those occasions to the Pima Air and Space Museum and many of the aircraft pictures I have made there are posted in a Flickr album.

Constellation - pinhole

 I have also enjoyed visits to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona to see the current photo exhibits.  The CCP is the repository for the complete works of many of photography's greats including Ansel Adams.

Visits to Tucson invite the possibility of exploring the Saguaro National Park.

Museum Pieces

I shot FP4 and HP5+ in my Leica IIIa during our trip to Phoenix.  One of the mornings was spent at the Phoenix Art Museum where there was an exhibit of classic race cars.  The exhibit space was pretty dim, but the HP5+ coped well with that while still retaining a good range of tones.  The 35mm Jupiter 12 lens provided enough depth of focus to let me make all the shots wide open at 1/40.

In the upstairs photo gallery there was an Ansel Adams exhibit.  The point of the exhibit was a demonstration of how Adams created differing versions of images from the same negatives by cropping, dodging and burning.  That is not surprising for photographers, but I think it was probably instructive for people not familiar with photo processing techniques.  The most dramatic example of Adams' skill was his famous Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico print which looked very bland before he darkened the sky and burned in the details of the clouds.
    It seems there is always at least one big mistake in the captions that accompany any large exhibit like this Adams show.  In this case it involved a portrait of Alfred Stieglitz made by Adams in the late 1930s.  The caption correctly stated that Adams made the picture with a Contax I 35mm rangefinder, but then asserted that the image which was about 8x10 was a contact print!

( 3/24/25: On giving this some more thought, there is a possibility of the image having been produced as a contact print if an enlarged internegative was made in the same way Weston usually made 8x10 prints from smaller medium-format negatives.)

Stieglitz by Adams

Adams by Weston

Phoenix

I am always invaded by a sense of unreality when I get to Phoenix.  I was there for a few days recently to attend a wedding.  The disorientation was even greater on this occasion as on arrival we ran into a massive traffic jam occasioned by a an accident on I-17 which slowed our progress into town to a crawl.

After a day or so, and following some contact with our family there, I get a bit more comfortable with the place.  However, when I drive down the long streets and avenues, the thought creeps back into my mind that I am in some kind of alternate reality.
    It seems there is just one dominant idea of the good life in the great sprawl that comprises Phoenix and it is replicated every few miles in each community that you pass through.  Each place has a strip mall with the same collection of chain stores and fast food joints which serve as a facade for endless tracts of ranch-style homes punctuated by long-stemmed palms.

My observations and my imagination lead me to the idea that the residents of Phoenix  are uniformly detached from any connection to national and international political concerns, directing their attention instead to sporting events and the acquisition of large motorized toys.  That is likely an unfair judgment, but it is hard to shake the idea that Phoenicians conceive of the rest of the world as a kind of fairy tale to which they have only a remote connection.

I have to admit that ignoring the rest of the world is an understandable strategy if you feel that you have little or no real control over the course of world events.  And, of course, there are a lot of nice things to be found in Phoenix.  We rented a beautiful three-bedroom house for just a hundred bucks per day -- about what we would normally pay for a hotel room.
    There is also the fact that Phoenix is an island in a vast and amazing desert.  The saguaro  cactus lend a somewhat exotic look to the land, but the endless grass-covered rolling hills, dotted with junipers and cut by shallow arroyos and steep canyons make me feel at home.  It is a part of the landscape that stretches from the Snake River to the Rio Grande in which I chose to live out the better part of my life.

The camera I took to Phoenix and used to photograph the little carnival near where we stayed was a Zorki 2-C.  A friend gave me one about ten years ago; it had a mismatched bottom plate.  I bought another on line for parts for next to nothing that turned out after a little cleaning  to to be better than the first.  I have made a lot of pictures with the 2-C which has a very smooth film advance and an accurate shutter.  I have collapsible FED and Industar lenses for the Zorki that are very sharp and compact, and I also often use a Jupiter 12 wide-angle with an accessory finder.

Agfa Synchro Box

A friend gave me this pretty Agfa Synchro Box just after I had decided to go on a nearly year-long sabbatical from photography.  So, it has taken me much longer than it should have to get some pictures from the camera.  This '50s box resembles the earlier Agfa Shur Flash, but the case and the inner cone are all metal and the front plate sports a natty deco design.  As the name implies, the camera has a couple contacts on the top deck for attaching an accessory flash.  It also has two aperture settings, a built-in yellow filter, a tab which permits a choice of instant or time exposures, and both tripod and cable release sockets.  The viewfinder windows are small, but bright.

The Synchro Box yields 8 frames from standard 120 roll film which is still easy to find on line.  I shot two rolls of Lomography 100 color film in the camera.  One roll was used mostly on a trip to Phoenix, the other on a morning walk through the Albuquerque Botanical Gardens.  I like the results from the film just fine, but the gray numerals on black backing paper present a real challenge to read through the ruby window.  The only way I could see the frame numbering was to hold the back of the camera so that the sun shone directly on it.  I hate doing that as there is always a risk that some light will bleed through or around the paper backing.

The adjustable aperture does add some adaptability to different lighting conditions, but I selected scenes that would allow using the smaller f16 setting as I felt that would likely give me sharper results and better depth of field.

A manual for the Agfa Synchro Box is available on line at the Butkus web site.

 

Albuquerque has been getting different weather every day lately, not unlike much of the rest of the country, I guess.

For most of the pictures on the second roll through the camera I used a Kodak No.13 accessory close-up lens which is a perfect fit to the Agfa lens ring.  That lets the camera get within nice portrait range of about 3.5 feet, and I think it also adds a bit of sharpness to the resulting images.  The little garden sculpture which is a favorite test subject compares nicely to other camera images I have made at the garden.

The wagon wheel in the garden's demonstration farm yielded the sharpest result in my close-up series.  Some of the other shots were a bit fuzzy, either because I misjudged the distance, or perhaps because I didn't have the accessory lens seated quite properly.











I was surprised to come across this porcupine enjoying a breakfast of low-hanging tree twigs near the entrance to the Japanese Garden.  He stood still for his portrait, but didn't look particularly happy about the opportunity, and the shot is not a very good likeness.  Still, it was nice to get a chance to do a bit of nature photography with a box camera.

Chihuly

Our visit to Phoenix coincided with a show of Chihuly blown glass scuptures at the botanical garden.  We had seen an excellent PBS show about the production of the work, but this was our first exposure to the real objects.

Quite a few visitors posed family members for pictures in front of the sculptures.  I'm not sure why.

The skill and craftsmanship that goes into it is undeniably impressive, but I could not find much enthusiasm in myself in looking at the sculptures.  I think I might have preferred to see them in a gallery.  In the naturalistic setting of the garden, they seemed out of place.  The contrasts with the bizarre natural forms of the cactus and succulents were not favorable to the plastic textured sculptures.

The Albuquerque botanical garden has a yearly show of led-lit sculptures which is also uninteresting to me.  The traditional garden sculptures seem fine, but the modern stuff is just intrusive.  I guess I just don't like the combination.

There was a gift shop of Chihuly items including books, coffee mugs, etc., all impressed with the Chihuly brand.  It pretty much summed up everything I find objectionable about what is today called fine art.

Not Chihuly.

Phoenix in a Box

My latest yard sale find, the Genos Rapid.

Four more from Phoenix

From a roll of Fuji 200.

The f2.7 Tricor lens seems a little soft around the edges, but I thought it handled a variety of subjects and conditions very well. I changed the focus with a shim behind the lens, but have decided now that it was unnecessary.  I'll try to make some controlled test shots with my next roll of film to get a better idea of the accuracy of the focus.

Dispatch from Phoenix

We're visiting my daughter's family for a week in Phoenix.

I took a walk down Central this morning to try out a Genos Rapid box camera that I recently picked up at a yard sale.  One of the first things I came across was this Peregrine falcon sitting on the sign on the facade of a hotel.

I went back to the room to get my digital which has a good zoom and took quite a few shots.  I've only seen a handfull of Peregrines in the wild, so this was a thrill for me.  Peregrines have been nesting in the city for about fifteen years, but only fledged young for the first time in 2009.

Rules To Live By

1.  Don't panic.

2.  Do something.

3.  Go to step one.