A Morning at the Zoo

 I was one of the first visitors through the gate of the Rio Grande Zoo on Friday morning.  I was alone for much of the hour circuit of the exhibits.  As it turned out, there were also few animals to be seen as most had yet to be let into their outdoor spaces.  I decided to head back toward the exit by way of the Africa section and found to my delight that the hippos and their month-old baby were in the pond.

I think it has been determined that the baby is a female.  I believe that she weighed about fifty pounds at birth.  She is playful and active and seems completely comfortable in her aquatic environment.  While I watched, the mother several times swam under the bridge over the pond, and there was a good deal of thrashing and bellowing underneath as she was apparently letting the big male know that he was expected to remain in the small section of the pond well away from the little one.

The cheetah's enclosure is near the hippos and they were also active, possibly inspired by the cool morning air.

I gave the expired Fuji 400 an extra stop of exposure and some extra time in the Cinestill C-41 to compensate for the film's age and the fact that this was the 13th roll through this processing kit.  The aperture-priority automation of the Pentax ME makes it a very pleasant camera to shoot; all these shots were made with the SMC Pentax-A f/2.8 135mm lens.

The camera's well-placed controls, bayonet lens mount and compactness makes it a quick shooter.  To appreciate the small size of this advanced slr it is worthwhile to compare it to my Leica IIIa; the body dimensions are nearly equal.  Of course, that is a tribute to the pioneering Barnack design,  as well as to the Japanese innovators who brought the 35mm format into the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

An American Favorite

The Universal Mercury II CX has always seemed to me to be one of the most interesting camera designs produced in the U.S.  or anywhere.

The half-frame format was uncommon at the time, the rotary shutter was rugged and accurate up to 1/1000, the coated Tricor lens was sharp, and the price was very competitive.  In spite of those unique qualities, the camera today is frequently the target of derision on photography forums.  The criticisms seem to come most often from people with little or no actual experience with the camera.  While I sometimes feel a slight urge to post responses to some of those opinions, it always seems more worthwhile to just go out and make some pictures with the camera.  These latest were made on a recent outing to Albuquerque's Rio Grande Zoo.

The film was some well-expired Fuji 400, the twelfth roll processed in my current batch of Cinestill C-41.

Multitasking with the VUWS

The small size and light weight of the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim (vuws) camera makes it easy to carry.  It often rides along in my shirt pocket, even when I am out mainly to shoot with another of my cameras.  The result is that the roll of film in the vuws often ends up with a grab-bag of photos and several story lines.  My last roll of film, some expired Fuji color, included walks through the neighborhood and a couple trips to the Rio Grande.

Our near-downtown neighborhood has undergone a lot of changes since we moved here about thirteen years ago, mostly in the direction of gentrification.  Quite a few old working-class homes have been torn down and replaced with upscale two-storied block houses.  The same fate has befallen local commercial buildings, though a few are being renovated and repurposed like this one at 6th St. and Mountain Ave.

The old door and windows are mostly sealed, to what purpose I don't know at present.  The interesting thing I noted, however, is that stripping off an outer layer revealed an old painted identity, Farmer Brothers Coffee.  My first thought was that the building had housed a long-gone coffee shop.  Consulting google maps, however, I saw what looks like the new home of Farmer Brothers Coffee across town, and the description of the site as an importer, manufacturer and wholesale/retail seller of coffee, tea and other food items.  I might have figured that out without google if I had not been buying just one brand of coffee for the last two decades.  So, anyway, I went to the company's website and found a very nicely produced five-minute video history made to celebrate the company's one hundredth anniversary.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the roll of film was taken up with my frequent visits to the Rio Grande and its bordering cottonwood forest, known locally as The Bosque.  This time of year the main attraction for us is the marvelous blooming of the Yerba Mansa which covers acres of the riverside forest south of the Hispanic Cultural Center.  The shaded setting is a bit of a challenge for the fixed-aperture camera, but the wide exposure latitude of the color film keeps picture harvesting a viable possibility.

For our dog, Roxy, the flowers hold little interest.  For her, splashing in the shallows of the river is her greatest joy in life.  

New Mexicans optimistically refer to their rainy season as The Monsoon.  That has been a bit of a stretch with a historic average yearly rainfall of around ten inches.  Now, even those ten inches are getting hard to come by and the state is in a long term period of drought.  In fact, the possibility has been raised that the river at Albuquerque could run dry this year; something I believe that no one now alive has seen.  Of course, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to weather.  The reality is that the amplitude of the extremes has heightened with climate change.  Two years ago the Rio Grande, swollen with some sudden rains and snowpack runoff, overflowed its banks and turned bosque paths into swift moving streams.  This year those floods are a dim memory as sandbars crowd the river channel.  We'll find some water for Roxy to indulge her passion, but it may not be in the Rio Grande.

Like New

I decided to try some of the expired color film I recently acquired.  I am not usually optimistic about the chances of getting predictable results from old color film, but this Fuji 400 was only a few years past its expiration date and it had been in frozen storage.  I loaded the roll into my Spotmatic SP, made a few shots on a walk in the Sandia Mountains, and then finished up with a morning stroll around our neighborhood.

I processed the film in Cinestill C-41 for six minutes at 95C and can't see any issues with the pictures attributable to the film's age.  I have one more roll of the Fuji, and several of Kodak Gold which is considerably older, but it has also been properly stored.

No film test of course is complete without a picture of the cat.