Colores de Quarai

The Quarai site is close up to the south end of the Manzano Mountains, so it catches a little more rain than the other two Salinas Pueblo Missions as the clouds pile up against the mountains.  In mid-July there is a large amount of coyote gourd starting to produce gourds, and the groves of cottonwood and other trees provide a lot of welcome shade.  I suspect the trees were not a prominent feature of the landscape when the pueblo was still populated back in the 17th Century.  People who rely on wood for cooking and warmth cannot usually afford the luxury of ornamental shade trees.

Roxie enjoyed making a couple new friends, and she was especially well-behaved on the leash during our walk through the Quarai site.

This model of the Quarai Mission church and convent was constructed and restored quite a long time ago.  The architectural studies of the Salinas Pueblo Mission sites are also mostly quite old.  Given the present day availability of 3D drawing software it seems like it would be pretty easy to create much more interesting re-creations of the site.  Archaeologists have begun to use drones and 3D software to document sites and their excavation, but not so much for constructing 3D models of the complete structures.

ClipPix ETC

This interesting little cemetery chapel is in Punta de Agua just before the turnoff to Quarai.

Colores de Abó

I shot part of a roll of Fuji 200 in my Pentax Spotmatic at the Abó ruins in the morning and finished it off at Quarai in the afternoon.  Knowing that my C-41 kit was pretty anemic at this point I decided to drop off the film for processing on the way home at the one place in town that still develops color film.

I was a little surprised to find the the local lab's results had all the same deficits as I have been seeing in my own C-41 results at home.  The negatives looked to be one or two stops under-done, and there were quite a few white spots to be stamped out in Photoshop, along with some red stains bleeding in from the spaces between frames.

The Unicolor and Cinestill C-41 kits I use are out of stock at all the on-line sites I have looked at, and that seems to be expected to persist until the Fall.  I have poked around on the net to get some insight on the shortages and quality issues, but have not come up with any explanations.

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Two more from the Abó site.  The little Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim does a nice job of blending the subject and its environment.

Abó

The Abó pueblo and mission ruins are part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument about an hour south of Albuquerque.  The Spanish invaders took control of the Tanoan pueblo in the 17th Century and built the church.  The site was abandoned after about fifty years due to drought and  Apache raids.

These pictures were made on my last roll of Acros which I processed in Rodinal 1:50.  The camera was my Kodak Reflex II.

The challenge in photographing these ruins is to get something that looks different from the many thousands of pictures which have been made of the sites in the past.  There was also a large crew at Abó working on stabilizing the ruins.

The photographer pictured making a shot with a fine 4x5 is Joe Van Cleave.