Cars are great subjects for the camera. Getting good pictures at car shows, however, is a difficult challenge. Last Saturday, I showed up about an hour before the scheduled start time of the Brit car show in Mesilla so I could grab some pictures before the cars were packed in the plaza like sardines and festooned with signs. The picture of the MG roadster was made with my '50s Contaflex. I liked the old postcard look which reminded me of the great days of touring in New Mexico when O'Keeffe and her friends travelled the dusty highways in fast, open cars.
    I also made a few images with my newly-restored Kodak Reflex II, and will post those soon in the vintage cameras section of the web site.

As deserts go, the Chihuahuan is rather wet and green. We have a nice crop of wildflowers this year around the house thanks to unusual late winter and early Spring rains. The hillsides are painted in yellows and blues. There are large patches of evening primrose - more than I've ever seen before. The pretty little wild onion are thick, but easy to miss unless you get down to their level. And, of course, there is an unending parade of showy cactus blossoms.

Quacks like a duck

I took a backpack-full of my old cameras to visit the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. I was surprised to find this old experimental XJL-1 amphibian. Only a few were made; while said to be a new design at the time by Grumman, the hull was clearly derived from a pre-WWII Grumman Duck.

    I had the opportunity to fly in an orginal bi-wing Duck in 1959 in southern Colombia. I had travelled far up tributaries of the Amazon by river launch to visit a tribe known as the Matapie. When it came time to leave, I was facing another long river trip without a lot of enthusiasm, and when offered a chance to ride out in the Duck, I jumped at it. I rode down in the cargo compartment just over the large pontoon. I recall that I couldn't see much out of the square side window, and I shared the compartment with a traveling companion, a large turtle and some plastic bags full of water and tropical fish. We flew to Leticia on the Amazon where I was later able to catch a ride back to Bogotá.
    The Duck was owned by an animal and tropical fish exporter named Mike Tsalikis. He used the plane to pick up the fish and animals from trappers who worked for him all over the upper Amazon. I heard some time later that one of the Duck's wing floats was damaged while landing in a river at a remote location, and the pilot had to taxi down-river over a hundred miles to get home. In Leticia, I also got a chance to see a couple of old war-surplus bombers that were used to transport the fish and animals to Miami, a B-17 and a B-29.

We are on the way to Phoenix to visit the grandchildren. These two shots were made on their last visit to New Mexico in October. The first, of Alejandro, was made with a 1956 Russian rangefinder, the Kiev IIa, mounting the Jupiter 8 lens. The picture of Cherynne is from a Voigtlander Bessamatic , a single-lens reflex that is just a few years younger.

Also hope to spend some time in Tucson visiting the Center for Creative Photography, and maybe also the Pima Air Museum. Should have a few new pictures when we get home.

I was asked recently which are the earliest blooming wildflowers in my part of the Chihuahuan Desert.


I couldn't come up with an answer. There are always at least a few flowers blooming here, even in mid-winter. It is more a question of my attention at the moment, rather than what is happening.

Right now, nearly every honey mesquite has a clump of Arizona Jewel Flowers growing underneath. There are a lot of Wooly Daisies, some going to seed already. This morning, I found a yellow Evening Primrose, the first I have seen this year.

Some B&W images.
The first was shot on digital; it is a seed pod collected by Margaret on Percha Creek. We are still trying to identify it. (I'm inclined to believe after a little research, that this is Datura ferox, a non-native, Old World species.)
My favorite old Kodak No. 2 Folding Camera captured the next two images. The trashed kitchen is in an abandoned ranch house near Radium Springs. The shot over the lunch counter was made in Hillsboro.

After a brief, wet winter Spring is bursting out in the desert of southern New Mexico. It promises to be a great year for wildflowers.

We really didn't have a winter last year, and it has been about five years since we've seen near to this amount of snow. It is still snowing at the moment, but what is on the ground is already melting. The quail didn't show up for their daily handout until around noon. View Slideshow

Why do we see as we do? Dogs and horses get by in a black and white world. Color images do not seem to serve the interests of either predator or prey. Perhaps color would be a distraction where the senses of smell and hearing have great importance.
For birds, the selective advantage of color seems to outweigh the risks. The color sensitivity of the human eye seems not to be an evolutionary response aimed at reproductive advantage; we are, after all, a rather drab species. Perhaps it is that we are fundamentally omnivores with a need to discern many subtle differences in which color is one important component.
I think some insects and birds may respond to light polarization. Are there creatures that would perceive my house as my camera does when equipped with an infrared filter?
View an IR slide show

The village of Doña Ana is rather like a pile of pickup sticks with the streets intersecting at unexpected angles. In the old part of town, the adobe houses are clustered around a small, mission-style church. There is a new plaza with a fountain and a statue beside the church, and some renovation of the old houses in progress. Around that small island of hope to rescue the past, however, is a spreading sea of new houses. The train track runs straight past the west side; a lot of freight flows by, but there's no reason to stop as there was when the train was the main way for people to move quickly up and down the Rio Grande valley. At the east end of town are three gas stations, a dollar store in a little strip mall, and a new highway overpass.

It didn't take a day in San Francisco for us both to conclude that we should chuck everything and move back to The City. Talking with friends about real estate and rental prices brought us back to reality. We'll find another way to spend more time there sometime soon.
Photos from the trip shot with my old cameras are in five photobucket folders where they may also be viewed in slideshow format:(opens in new window)
At Night
Conservatory
Embarcadero
Around Town
Bodega Bay

San Francisco, 1970; My Beautiful Life We are on our way back for a visit. Hope to have more to say and show in a couple weeks.

Cyanotype

I've recently begun making cyanotype prints of some of my favorite images on watercolor paper. The cyanotype process is an antique print making technique which uses light sensitive iron salts in place of the more common silver gelatin. The cyanotype emulsion is hand painted on the paper, which is then sandwiched together with a negative and exposed to the sun for a minute to produce a contact print.  Development and fixing of the Prussian blue image is accomplished with a few minutes wash in slightly acidified water.

Many of my images that I like best come from the simplest cameras. I'm not entirely sure why that is; possibly the simplicity of the system gets me better focused on composition. I acquired this old Agfa-Ansco box camera recently at a cost of two dollars. It is the oldest of my box cameras, probably dating from the mid to late 'Twenties. The camera is made largely from wood and cardboard; in spite of the simple materials used in construction it is put together very precisely. The seams of the parts are so tight that there are almost none of the usual blemishes on the viewfinder lenses and mirrors. This is the only old camera I have in which the core of the film take-up spool is made of wood. The picture of the Rio Grande was made from Dead Man's Curve, not far from our home. The others were taken in the old village of Doña Ana north of Las Cruces.

I get to most of the local car shows around Las Cruces. These photos are from Saturday's Lions Club Show at the Plaza in Mesilla. The event is scheduled on the one day of the year when rain is almost guaranteed. According to one of the organizers, if the Lions Club didn't have bad luck, it wouldn't have any. There were less visitors to the show than might have showed up on a sunny morning, but the enthusiasm of the car owners was not noticibly dampened. The first shot shows a mural on the hood of a truck that is in a currently popular photo-realistic style. The cameras were the Pentax Spotmatic and the Kodak Retina IIc.

While Margaret was attending a conference in Albuquerque, I took a morning walk through the bosque beside the river, then through the botanical gardens and on to the zoo. Photos of my excursion through the Albuquerque Biopark were made with several of my old cameras, including the Kodak Retina IIa, the Pentax Spotmatic, and the Olympus 35 RC. Albuquerque has done a great job of preserving the cottonwood forest beside the river, and the botanical gardens and the zoo are fine places to spend a weekend.

After an August-and-a-half of rain we are starting to dry out. Our property is carpeted with yellow cowpen daisies, much as it was when we first moved here.

Several weeks of heavy rain brought flash floods and created a swamp on the flats below our house. A thousand toad chorus was soon followed by a million tadpoles. Late-blooming wildflowers sprang to life everywhere, most in white or yellow.

My pinhole photograph of a balloon ascension in Las Cruces has been published in the September 2006 issue of The Sun magazine. If you request a free trial issue at the web site, it is likely that you will receive the current one with the photo.

This is an image that scales up well; a big enlargement of it will be displayed in an exhibit of my pinhole work in February at the Rio Grande Theater Gallery in Las Cruces.( I have cancelled the pinhole exhibit. )

The image of the old Ford and its companion '24 Dodge was made with my pinhole camera. The location was the parking lot of a church in Radium Springs. Free bbq sandwiches, green chiles in the beans, and classic cars. What more could a guy want? A few days later I used the pinhole camera to make a series of pictures of the front end of a mile-long train between Hatch and Rincón.