2010

 

Getting Out

 We have had some marvelous blue sky days which have encouraged me to get out with the cameras.  On Monday I took the dog along on a short hike in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains east of town.  It was really nice to get away from city streets and into the natural setting, so full of forms, shadows and textures.

I decided to try a red filter which is not something I have done before.  The auto-exposure of the Pentax ME handled the challenge ok, but the dark filter made it nearly impossible to see what I was aiming for.

When I got up to the base of the hill I was delighted to see a small group of mule deer peering down at me.

They were aware of the dog nosing around in the brush below, but they seemed more curious than fearful.

 If the weather holds I'll try to get back to the same place with a longer lens.

A week earlier:

I had heard and seen a lot of Sandhill Cranes in the sky, so I went out to the Los Poblanos Open Space just east of the river where they can often be seen this time of year.  In past years the birds have shown up there in the hundreds, but they are not attracted to the area in such numbers now since there has been no corn planting.  On this occasion I saw only about a dozen on the ground  and a few more in the air.

 I'll get out soon to some likely spots on the river to look for the cranes.

Time Flies

 The arrival of wintering Sandhill Cranes is usually heard before it is seen. Their strange, trilling calls carry for great distances in the winter blue sky. It is a sound that came from the sky a million years before the first humans appeared anywhere on the planet.

I have seen fewer cranes this year in the usual places I find them.  I attribute that to the fact than no corn was planted this year at the Los Poblanos Open Space. It took me a week of walking around the Open Space fields and through the riverside forest to get close enough for a few shots of the birds with my longest telephoto.

Fancy Boxes

 

I have never developed a good working relationship with my Box Tengor cameras.  Zeiss Ikon gave them features which are seldom matched by other box cameras, and they are certainly stylish.  While the aim was to give users enhanced capabilities in a relatively simple and inexpensive camera, that objective cannot be realized without applying a rather rigorous technical discipline in use.

The camera's weak point is the slow shutter (at best, a 30th of a second), combined with a rather awkward shutter release. What that means is that it is unlikely you will realize the resolution advantage of the two-element Frontar lens unless you use a cable release with the camera mounted on a tripod.  The reflex viewfinders are a bit bigger and brighter than those of many pre-war box cameras, but provide nowhere near the compositional help of the brilliant finders of the post-war era.

Well, I knew all of the above when I took my Box Tengor 56/2 for a couple of walks recently, but I ignored my own advice and shot handheld in sometimes challenging light.  Getting the depth of field right for the subject requires an exact pairing of discrete focal and exposure settings which often escaped me.  Still, I thought some of the pictures from the roll of Acros showed a hint of the camera's capabilities.  I'll take another stab at using one of the Box Tengors soon, though I've now shot my last roll of Acros, and that will introduce another variable into the test regime.

Get out of town!

I've been feeling the need for a change of scenery since access to my usual nearby sites has become limited.  So, I got in my pickup and drove over to the east side of the Sandia Mountains.  I turned up the road that leads to the summit of the Sandias and drove a few miles to one of the first stops in the Cibola National Forest, the Doc Long Picnic Site.

The site was originally built by the Civilian Conservation Core in 1935, and the facilities retain the rustic look that characterizes many such National Forest locations in the West.  From the parking lot it is just a short hike uphill to the first ridge, which I followed for about half a mile.

I was struck by the fact that every stable surface including tree trunks and rocks are covered thickly with lichens.

I'm always pleased to find an example of the Alligator Juniper.  They can sometimes be found in small groves, but often there are isolated examples like this one among the pines and oaks.  The thick-trunked ones can be centuries old.

The undergrowth in New Mexico evergreen forests often include many plants from the dry lower elevations such as cactus, rabbitbrush and desert wildflowers.

Low growing shrubs with oak-shaped leaves always make me a little apprehensive because of my experience with poison oak in California, but I think these are probably Gambel Oaks.

It was very pleasant to get away from the summer heat in the Rio Grande Valley, and I intend to get back to the Sandias again soon.

Summer

New Mexico has seen record July temperatures this year.  Even on 100-degree days, however, I can still enjoy an early morning walk to the west beside the river, or to the east in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.

red filter

Snow

A sunny day illuminated the Sandia Mountains graced with a six-inch layer of snow.  I took the dog and my Kodak Reflex II tlr loaded with TMY 400 for a walk up the Embudito Trail.  I got a couple overlapping frames on the roll, but the camera otherwise performed pretty well until I reached the eighth frame.

I was able during the first half of the walk to let the dog loose while I concentrated on making pictures.  When I started running into people and their dogs I had to put the dog back on the leash, and that pushed beyond the boundaries of success with an old tlr.

Near the top of the trail I decided to try a close-up shot.  I got the film advanced to the eighth frame, but my slightlly impaired  vision, the dog pulling on the leash and numb hands ended my photo session.  I stared cranking the focus without really seeing or feeling what I was doing and managed to completely screw off both lenses which dropped into the snow.  While that was it for the tlr, I thought I might still grab a few shots on the way back down the mountain with the Olympus Infinity Stylus I had in my pocket.  Looking at the time, however, I saw that it was 3:30 PM.  I was supposed to be sitting down to dinner with freinds at 4:30 and we were at the top of a long, slippery trail and a drive across town.  So, I just hooked up the dog and we made as close as I could get to a lightning descent.

The next day, after consulting Rick Oleson's exploded-view drawing  and the berndtmn camera repair page, I spent a couple hours reinstalling and collimating the lenses on the Reflex II.  I'll load a roll of Acros to see if I got the focus properly set.  Most of the snow was burned off the Sandias after another day of sunshine, but we look to be in for another big storm starting on New Years Day.

on the trail

I walked for an hour up into the foothills of the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque with my Pentax Spotmatic SP.

The white speck just above center in the shot below is the tramway car riding the wire up to the summit.

My walk got me about half way up the Domingo Baca Canyon Trail which ends near the 1955 crash site of TWA Flight 260.

Sandia Wilderness

First roll of color processed with my second Unicolor kit