Bumps in the Road

 My Nikon FE has made some good pictures for me, but I haven't made a lot of use of it.  I decided to rectify that neglect with a trip to the zoo on a fine morning.  I made all the shots there with the Vivitar 3.5/70-210mm macro zoom.

  I grabbed a quick still life the next morning and then took a walk in Old Town with the Nikkor -P Auto 2.5/105mm.

When I got to Old Town I found that the meter's batteries had died, so I switched to manual exposure to finish off the roll of Fuji Neopan 400.  Back home, I processed the film in HC110b.  About a third of the zoo shots were blank frames.

The short series of shots from Old Town were ok, so I'm hoping the dying batteries accounted for the missing zoo shots.  I'll shoot another roll of the Neopan 400 to test that theory, and maybe also try developing in PMK to comapare with the HC110 results.

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.

Spare Parts

 In one week I managed to break the plastic rewind cranks on two old cameras that I like, the Nikon EM and my two-decade-old Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.  Luckily for me I had a spare crank for the VUWS, and the Nikon EM was put back in working order thanks to the generosity of a friend.

So, time to test the repairs.  I headed over to the Los Poblanos fields to see if I could find some wintering Sandhill Cranes.  Thee were plenty of birds, but none were willing to allow me close enough for a picture.  I had to settle for a shot of an old cottonwood which showed no objection to being photographed.

Nikon EM

The next day I took  both cameras to the Tingley ponds. The little Ultra Wide was loaded with Kendtmere 100.  In the Nikon EM I had a roll of slightly expired Fuji Neopan Presto which Jim Grey sent me some time ago, 

I had walked around one of the ponds with the Vivitar 70-210 Macro Zoom on the Nikon EM.  That gave me more than enough reach to shoot the lounging ducks and geese.  Back at my starting point I rewarded my subjects with a single slice of bread which caused quite a lot of excitement.  There is a sign at the pool's edge requesting that people not feed the birds, but I figured my small transgression would not be noticed.

Shortly afterward this woman arrived in an suv and distributed about forty pounds of bird food to the ducks and geese.  She told me she did this daily!  I captured the scene with the Ultra Wide.

With two rolls of film to process I decided to do them together with semi-stand development in highly diluted HC110, following the technique developed by hjlphotos.  That turned out well with the Fuji Neopan 400.  The Kentmere 100 from the Ultra Wide did not like that choice however, and I had to resort to some careful photoshopping to get something acceptable.