Exercising the X-700

I paid just twenty dollars at a yard sale for my Minolta X-700 three years ago.  Since then it has made a lot of pictures I like.  The camera is light weight and compact and the Minolta lenses I have tried have all produced excellent results.  I took along the X-700 a couple days ago when I visited the Albuquerque Botanical Garden. I mounted the MD 1.7/50 lens and loaded a roll of Kentmere 400.

A couple days later I decided to find out if my MC Tele Rokkor 3.5/135 could be trusted.  I had disassembled the lens several times because of the sluggish action of the aperture stop-down mechanism.  I finished off the roll of Kentmere with some pictures of the informal Friday car show in Old Town.  The lens sounded like it was doing ok, but only half the frames were properly exposed.  That was disappointing as the Tele Rokkor had made some very nice images for me in the past.  I'll probably look for another one as I don't feel a kit is complete without a 135mm.

Painter/Photographers

 I saw a piece on PBS about the painter/photographer, Barkley L. Hendricks.  The program featured a current exhibit of his work, but I see there is also a recent book about his photography.  It looks like both provide some insights into the relationship between his photos and his paintings.  Hendricks was not on my radar before he was gone, so I'm looking forward now to familiarizing myself with his dual accomplishments.

The attention to the Hendricks show and book immediately brought to mind the work of another painter/photographer, Harold Joe Waldrum, who had his studio in Truth or Consequences and who is best known for his paintings and prints of old adobe churches all around New Mexico.  Waldrum, like Hendricks, apparently initially made his photographs as sketches for his painting and printmaking,  but the photography seemed to take on a life of its own.

Waldrum's polaroids, made with an SX-70, are very carefully composed, showing the same attention to light, shadow, form and color as his painted work.  Thousands of those polaroids ended up in the Museum of New Mexico and are now in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives.  Over 900 of the little photo prints appeared in an exhibit at the Albuquerque Art Museum which I had the pleasure to attend in 2011.  One of Waldrum's prints of a red walled church was included recently in an exhibit about print making at the Albuquerque Museum; I'm pretty sure there is a polaroid twin.

Exhibits at the Albuquerque Museum are often accompanied by postcard reproductions of the the art works which are made available at no charge to visitors.  In the case of the 2011 Waldrum exhibit, six prints were included in a fanfold booklet, with each being the same size as the originals.  I'm pleased to say I held on to my copy.

Time Travel

 After finishing the twelve black and white shots in the Argoflex Forty I made another circuit of the Albuquerque Museum car show with my Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju) loaded with Kodak Gold 200.  The little Olympus has a lot to recommend it for such events.  It is easily slipped in a pocket.  The 35mm lens is very sharp.  The auto-focus and auto-exposure seldom miss their mark.

The two-block walk back to my car found me two classics in the wild, a T-Bird and a Lotus.

The Show

 On a Sunday in May the parking lot and the street in front of the Albuquerque Art Museum are populated by the automotive treasures of the area.  There are an equal number of opportunities and challenges for photographers at the event.  The sun is always very bright and it shines on acres of chrome, producing dazzling reflections interspersed with deep shadows.  The cars, probably around a couple hundred, are packed side by side in each parking lane.  The free show draws a big crowd and it is often difficult to get an unobstructed view of the cars.

I think I logged a couple miles up and down the lanes over a couple hours, so I was glad I chose my lightweight Argoflex Forty to make my pictures of the show.  Quite a few people asked me about the camera.  One fellow took a picture of me and the Argoflex.  Most seemed somewhat surprised to find it was still possible to make pictures with such an instrument.

Riverdance

 I took a morning walk along the river.  A lot of water has been let through the dams for irrigation, so the bosque is getting the benefit too.  There is strong growth in the patches of yerba mansa and there a few flower buds on the plants.  I expect the flowering of the yerba mansa will reach its peak in a couple weeks.  So, I'll look forward to getting back soon, probably with the same camera and film.

The cat gets the last frame.

Zoom at the Zoo

I have made pictures I like at the zoo with quite a variety of old film cameras.  In terms of productivity, the champ is my Pentax SP with the Yashica Auto Yashinon Zoom 1:4.5 f=75mm~230mm.  I've used the big old zoom for little else, but at the zoo where the subject distance is largely under control of the animals the zoom gets me the tight compositions that I am looking for.   The maximum 4.5 aperture provides a slightly dim image in the viewfinder; that, along with the limited depth of field at 230mm, makes focusing on moving targets challenging.  However, with proper focus and an adequate shutter speed the resolution of the lens leaves little to complain about.

Savannah Dreams

Matilda will be a year old on July 20th.

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The Wikipedia page on the Hippo is worth a look:

... After the elephant and rhinoceros, the hippopotamus is the third-largest land mammal and is the heaviest extant land artiodactyl. Despite their physical resemblance to pigs and other terrestrial even-toed ungulates, the closest living relatives of the Hippopotamidae are cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises, etc.), from which they diverged about 55 million years ago ...

Miles gone by

 I revisited the southernmost section of the Petroglyph National Monument.  It has been quite a while -- five years? ten? -- I'm not sure.  Memories of the place were sparked by a recent discovery of the photographic work of David Grant Noble who spent about forty years documenting ancient ruins and rock art of the Southwest. I'm not sure how I missed seeing Noble's excellent pictures sooner; I only became aware of them because the Maxwell Museum has scheduled an exhibit and artist talk in May. I was pleased to find a couple copies of Noble's book, In the Places of the Spirits, in the Albuquerque Library.

I was also delighted to find that Craig Childs has published several books since I read House of Rain twelve years ago. I decided to start catching up with Childs by reading Tracing Time; Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau. Childs' approach to thinking about the ancient cultures of the Southwest is informed by familiarity with the academic research, but it is fundamentally the product of a unique personal immersion in the region's arid environment.

One of the topics Childs deals with in Tracing Time is the destruction of the ancient petroglyphs and pictographs.  In previous books he made the case for leaving any traces of past cultures completely undisturbed.  In this later work he suggests that those who deface and destroy ancient rock art are motivated by assertions of power and ownership which likely were behind similar destruction in ancient times.  It is not uncommon to find rock art panels with many layers of pecked or painted designs laid down over centuries.  The difference, of course, is that the destructive process has been greatly speeded up by exponential population growth along with greatly more efficient tools of destruction including firearms, spray paint and off-road vehicles.

Over the years I have maintained this blog I have at regular intervals acknowledged the idea that my photographic efforts would be enhanced by a more focused and deliberate approach, as opposed to just walking for miles and recording interesting sights I came across.  My journey back to Mesa Prieta yesterday was a concrete expression of that strategic option, brought about now by necessity.  I just can no longer wander for miles at a time to indulge an urge to record serendipitous discoveries.  I'll likely get back to National Petroglyph Monument again soon, and also hope to visit some of the many other rock art sites within a day's drive from Albuquerque.

I am also thinking I will try to narrow my choice of cameras to a few which are likely to produce reliable results to match my current photographic ambitions.  I exposed my recent roll of slightly expired Tri-X in my Mamiya C330, first on a walk beside the river, and then during my visit to the rock art site.  What I found in the process was that it would have been wise to quickly review the camera's manual before setting out as I encountered some problems with lens swapping which I was not prepared for. The C330 is the most versatile tlr available, but the controls are decidedly unintuitive.