Travelling with the Kiev IIa

 I loaded some Kentmere 400 in the Kiev IIa mounted with the Jupiter-12 35mm lens and rode my trike to Old Town.  As I was preparing to make some shots of the houses on Old Town Road these bikers rode into the frame.

The Plaza Vieja was jammed full of people in town for the first day of the Balloon Fiesta, so I just drove on through to the corner of the Museum.  The current exhibit is an extraordinary opportunity to see works seldom available in Albuquerque, and the message of the show is clearly relevant to our time.

Having got through just a few shots on the roll I took the camera along on our two-day trip to Las Cruces and Mesilla, where we walked around the Plaza on Sunday morning just as the Sunday service was ending at San Albino.

We had coffee in the shop next to the church and I made a few shots around the Plaza as I do on each visit.  I shot rather carelessly as it was a roll of 36.  However, the advance locked just past 20.  

When I developed the film the frames were spaced very narrowly and there was a light leak evident in the margins of a few frames.  Those are issues easily fixed, so I'll get to that before using the Kiev IIa again.

Broken Boxes

 The large fabric and metal sculpture near the entrance to the current exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum drew a lot of favorable attention from visitors.  All of the pieces exhibited were expertly crafted, though their meaning  and relatability  often seemed obscure to me.

 I first photographed the mother wolf figure with the Elmar 3.5/50 lens on my Leica IIIa.  I thought the resultant image on Kentmere 400 was quite good.  However, I wanted to better show the large scale of the piece, so I went back on another day with the Jupiter 12 2.8/35mm.  That did give me some images that better illustrated the liveliness and the context and proportionality compared to human dimensions.  The very low light level made it a challenging undertaking.

 The "Broken Boxes" title of the exhibit came from a podcast consisting of ten years of interviews with artists, including those in the current exhibition.  Even after reading some of the explanations on site, the show title still required some clarification for me.  A friend who is a docent at the museum suggested that the title terms could be similar to the concept of "out of the box" as the artists were all indigenous and were challenging prevalent ideas about their cultures.

The artists that created the wolf sculpture are Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt.

Film Wasting

 An ill spent couple of hours in Old Town.  Nice overcast light.  A camera and lens that have always made nice pictures for me.  I'm tempted to blame the results on the film having gone through at least two airport x-ray scans.  More probably, I was just careless with my shooting technique.  

I nearly always get home with a couple shots left on the roll in the camera.  Very often they turn out to be the frames I like best.  (I know I said the same thing yesterday, but it seemed like something worth repeating.)

Handy Portability

 One of the Leica's nicest features is its compactness.  I carried it along with me for several days while running errands and doing some pinhole work; it fits in about any available pocket, even with the Jupiter 12 and its wide-angle finder attached.  The first two pictures here are from the Elmar 3.5/50.  The rest were shot with the Jupiter 12.

The Neighborhood

 A slightly overcast sky provided some nice light for an early morning walk through the neighborhood with the 35mm Jupiter 12 lens on the Zorki 6.  

 

The negatives showed a slight tilt again, so I'll go back to putting a thin plastic washer over the protruding end of the film cartridge.  Otherwise, the camera is working faultlessly.

South

We spent four days visiting family and friends in Las Cruces.  I managed to fit in a couple of hours in the Organ Mountains and a morning walk in Old Mesilla.

Power To The People

Tweaking the Leotax & the Jupiter 12

 I took a walk in the neighborhood with the Leotax after making some adjustments.  

I decided to slightly lessen the tension on the first curtain in order to reduce the shutter capping which was giving me an uneven exposure across the frame.  The Leotax makes such adjustments a bit easier than the Leica.  You just lift the spring off the cogwheel and turn it slightly clockwise and then let the spring down again to maintain the setting.

I also applied some black paint to the rim of the Jupiter 12's rear element to eliminate some flare at the edge of the images.  

Both adjustments seem to have worked.  The exposure across the frame seemed even, and the odd flare I got in images from the Jupiter 12 lens was gone.  The film I used for the test was some Agfa APX 100, expired 07/98.  I gave the film a couple extra stops of exposure to compensate for age, but it still required a bit more of a boost with Photoshop to get the proper tonal values.  The APX was processed in Rodinal 1:50.

The Leotax really needs a full CLA, but I'll likely let someone else undertake that assignment.  I was pleased with the progress on the camera, and even more so with the improved performance of the Jupiter 12 lens, which is a favorite for use with the Barnack-style cameras.

Update

We enjoyed our 7/7/20 breakfast at Los Poblanos.

The outdoor seating looks out over fields of lavender toward the Sandia Mountains.

This was just the second time we have been to Los Poblanos.  The first was just a few months ago when we took out-of-town friends there for breakfast.  On that occasion we got to visit the huge kitchen and we could have sat at a table there and watched the meals being prepared.  We decided to put that off to the next visit, so that could be some time in the distant future now.

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