New Mexico's Next Governor

 I found this marvelous image today on Wikipedia while researching Deb Haaland's life story for a post on my other blog.

A wet-plate collodion photograph of Haaland in 2019

Shane Balkowitsch (photographer)

Congresswoman Debra Haaland, “Crushed Turquoise”, Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico’s 1st District, captured in the historic wet plate collodion process of pure silver on glass for “Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective”. This plate will be indefinitely archived at the North Dakota Historical Society here in Bismarck at the Heritage Center. This image of Congresswoman Haaland was taken by Shane Balkowitsch on June 23rd, 2019 in his natural light studio in Bismarck, North Dakota. The original plate now resides in the North Dakota Historical Society archive at the Heritage Center in Bismarck, North Dakota. 8x10” black glass ambrotype, Carl Zeiss Tessar 300mm lens, f4.5, 9 seconds of exposure, natural light through north-facing windows and skylight.

• CC BY-SA 4.0
• File:Congresswoman Debra Anne Haaland - Pueblo Laguna - New Mexico by Shane Balkowitsch in Wet Plate Collodion 6-23-2019.jpg
• Created: 23 June 2019
• Uploaded: 25 June 2019

A Rough Neighborhood

 Some media attention has been given lately to the discovery and dating of the preserved footprints of humans and extinct animals in the dry bed of an ancient lake in White Sands National Monument.  The DNA of pollen associated with the prints suggests an age of twenty thousand years.  That puts the arrival of humans in the New World much further back in time than previously thought.  It also means that the humans were coexisting with some fearsome large predators including Saber-toothed Cats and Dire Wolves.

The Dire Wolf exhibit at the Natural History Museum is nicely lit by large nearby windows, making it an attractive subject for my cameras.  On this occasion I was shooting my Olympus Pen-FT with the 1.8/38mm lens.

Lost and Found

 I found these in a neglected corner of my hard-drive.  They were made around twenty years ago at a field west of the Organ Mountains.  No info attached to the photos -- they were likely made with the Spotmatic.  I will try to track down the negatives to make some new scans.

UPDATE:

I was right about the timeframe; the pictures were made in February of 2004.  However, the camera was not my Spotmatic, but rather the Kiev IIa loaded with Tri-X.  Rescanning did not gain anything of interest beyond image size.

Still, I'm pleased I was able to find the negatives from twenty years ago.

Looking at Art in New Mexico

 Margaret and I spent a lot of time in galleries and museums in the last month.  The exhibition of Canadian Indigenous Art at the Albuquerque Art Museum was excellent.  A show of Black and White drawings and photographs at the New Mexico Art League was great fun.  

Margaret at Arts Thrive

Two exhibitions with great promise mostly brought disappointment.  The annual Arts Thrive benefit exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum had way too much art on the walls.  The Ways of Seeing exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe assembled classics from three private photography collections, but what might have been a great experience was ruined for me by abysmal lighting.  

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

 At the Santa Fe exhibit there were prints from many of Photography's great pioneers including Alfred Steiglitz and Ruth Berhard.  Gertrude Kasebier's small photogravure, "Blessed are thou amongst women", was so poorly lit that I was left wishing I had brought a flashlight.  In fact, all the galleries in the great old Santa Fe building  were dim and dingy looking.  The big palladium prints by David Michael Kennedy at least showed that there is still good work being done today in the State.

Two More from the SRT 201

 Monsoon rains are back in New Mexico.

Kentmere 400 in HC110b.  I wasn't too happy with the processing outcome, so I'm going back to PMK Pyro for the next roll.

Olympus Stylus Epic

 I took my Olympus Stylus Epic on a daytrip to Cerrillos New Mexico recently.  

The film was some old Fuji X-tra 400 which I had found at the bottom of my refrigerator.  I think this is only the third time I have used the camera since I picked it up for three bucks at a local thrift store.  The first roll had shown that the camera was leaking light through the top edge of the back.  I stuffed some black yarn into the back, trying to stop up the leak, but that did not work.  This time, I resorted to a couple strips of black electrician's tape and that got the job done.

In trying to figure out how to best deal with the light leak I googled "mju2 light leaks" and found that the problem was quite a common complaint.  It appears the rubber seals on the back as well as that around the lens become dried out.  I saw some suggestions that a rubber-restoring product available in car parts stores might correct the problem.  I'm happy enough for now with the black tape fix.

If you want to acquire a Stylus Epic and are not lucky as I was to find one in a junk store,  they can typically be had for $300 to $400 on ebay.  I even saw one go for $700.  It is a handy little camera, but paying those prices seems insane.

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.

River Walk

I took my Kodak Recomar 18 plate camera on a walk north of Jemez Springs where the Jemez River and its East Fork come together near Battleship Rock.

The Nagel-built Recomar is a little bulkier than the Patent Etui or the Bentzin Primar, but it is solidly constructed and it accepts the Rada film back, which is sturdier than the Rollex.  While the accessory film backs make all the plate cameras more practical to shoot, the added bulk interferes with the use of the wire-frame viewfinder by keeping the eye too far behind the rear sighting aperture.  The little swiveling reflex finder is small and subject to confusing reflexions.  The ground glass back can give very precise framing, but is awkward to swap out with the film backs.

I like to shoot 400-speed films in my medium format cameras because they give a nice range of tonality and grain is not perceptible in moderate enlargements from the big negatives.  My past favorites were Fuji Acros and Kodak TMAX, but I'm not willing to pay the current asking prices for those brands.  In fact, the only 120 roll film which meets my cheapskate standard is Fomapan at about five bucks a roll.  For the Jemez outing I loaded a roll of  Foma 400 which I shot at 200 ISO for processing in PMK Pyro.  I haven't been too impressed with the performance of Fomapan in the past, but I thought the results on this occasion were acceptable and worthy of further experimentation.

I ran out of energy walking the river trails when I had only used half the eight frames in the roll of Fomapan.  I stopped at the church ruins near Jemez Springs on the way back to make a couple more shots, and finely finished the roll on a walk around my neighborhood the next day.  These last shots were hand-held at 1/100 and f/16.  For the river pictures I had to use a tripod and shot at 1/2 sec. and f/22.

Accurately estimating distance and proper framing are the two big challenges with all the plate cameras.  I shot at small apertures to get adequate depth of focus and I had to crop all of the pictures to produce compositions which matched my intentions.  So, I clearly need some more practice with these cameras, but the nice qualities of the images they produce encourages me to keep at it.

Mesilla

We spent a few days visiting with friends and family in Las Cruces.  Our motel was close to the little town of Mesilla, so it just took a couple minutes to drive there on a Friday morning to visit the plaza and shoot a roll of film in my Brownie Hawkeye Flash.

The town clings tenaciously to its past; things change, but more slowly than in most places.  The economy is still closely attached to the land, and traveling south or west quickly brings visitors to fields of onions and vast pecan orchards irrigated only with ground water.  The Rio Grande is mostly dry long before it gets to Mesilla; the acequias that run through town contain only sand.

The Kodak Tri-X Pan Professional film I shot in Mesilla was rated at ISO 320; that would be a bit fast for a sunny day in the Brownie Hawkeye Flash, but it seemed like the twenty-seven years beyond the expiration date would likely have tempered the sensitivity of the film sufficiently to allow use in the old box camera.  I processed the film as recommended in the data sheet in the film box and I thought the results were pretty good.

Shooting the Beast

 I nearly always like the images I get from the Mamiya C330 and each time I shoot it I pledge that I will use it more often.  It doesn't happen.  I average picking up the camera once yearly.  That's been going on now for ten years.  

I loaded some HP5+ into the C330 on Saturday and went down to the river in the afternoon.  There were ducks, geese and cranes in the ankle-deep water from bank to bank.  It was a scene that seemed to call out for some telephoto work.  Of course, I had left the 180mm lens for the C330 at home along with all the other accessories for the camera.  Luckily, the 2.8/80mm lens is ultra-sharp and the HP5+ combined with PMK Pyro processing yields very fine grain.  So, I came home with one good bird shot.

I think the lens on my YashicaMat is likely just as sharp as the lenses I have for the C330.  However, the close focusing and parallax correction available in the Mamiya give it the edge whenever I'm out prospecting for images.

On my recent outing with the camera I used the waist-level finder; it is very bright and easy to focus with the flip-up magnifying lens.  The Porroflex finder is a little dimmer and does not completely show the full image that will be on the film, but it makes shooting at a downward angle much easier.  The accessory grip  in combination with the neck strap also contributes greatly to managing the heavy camera.

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.

El Malpais

We decided we needed a bit of an escape from the city, so we drove a hour west from Albuquerque to Grants and then turned south into the Malpais National Conservation Area.  The campgrounds and picnic areas are closed, but the hiking trails remain accessible.  We parked at the Zuni-Acoma trailhead and walked for a couple hours through a landscape of volcanic flows, sandstone bluffs and  twisted old junipers.