I was at my usual place in front of the computer soon after sunrise when I noticed the nice light that illuminates our street this time of year.  I threw on some clothes and went out on the sidewalk with my No.1A Pocket Kodak and a tripod.  I made a couple shots on a roll of Fomapan 400 of the house across the street and a couple of our place as well. The two story Henry Mann house was built in 1905.  When we first came to the neighborhood about fifteen years ago, the house was surrounded by about an acre of garden space.  About half of that area is now occupied by t ..read more

 I bought ten rolls of cheap Kodak color with the intent of shooting them mostly in my Olympus Pen-FT, five Kodak Gold 200 and five Ultramax 400.  Of these pictures on the Gold 200, the first four were shot at the zoo with the Olympus E. Zuiko 3.5/100mm.  The rest were from the Olympus F.Zuiko 1.8/38mm.     Coming off the scanner the colors looked a little muddy.  It may be that I let the Cinestill C-41 developer age a bit too much since I last used it.  I'll try an extra stop of exposure on the next roll to see it that gets better resul ..read more

 The closest I get to making photographs in panoramic format is when I shoot 120 rollfilm in one of my old Kodak folders designed to use the long-discontinued 116 format. I have long thought it would be fun to use one of the swing-lens Kodak Pano cameras from the same era, but the prices for them has always been a bit beyond my comfort level.  The recent revival of interest in the panoramic format has stirred my interest in doing more with the wide view, and several members of our New Mexico Film Photographers group have ably shown the way.  Most recently Bob Eggers has been p ..read more

 A brilliant Spring morning created some new perspectives on familiar subjects around the Plaza Vieja. The Leica IIIa and the 3.5/50 Elmar performed well as expected, but the combination of Kentmere 100 and HC110b made me work a bit harder in Silverfast and Photoshop to get the middle gray tones I wanted. * * * This post was provided courtesy of Windows XP.  I flipped my old Dell desktop on its head a couple times.  Once upright again it started up and performed normally.  I'm thinking the good outcome indicated a loose connection somewhere, but maybe it was just ..read more

 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 thr ..read more

 I walked around the neighborhood with my Pentax ME loaded with a roll of Kentmere 400, and then revisited the current exhibition of Canadian Indigenous Art at the Art Museum.     I was pleased to get some usable images of the masks on film given the dim light in the Museum.   The black & white worked well for the shot of the visitors, but the masks really needed color.  Luckily, I had my little Canon digital in my pocket, so I made shots of the indigenous art collection with that camera, and they are posted on my other blog ..read more

 I tipped over my old Dell desktop computer on its side so I could take off the side panel.  I could not see any obvious reason why it would not boot up, so I replaced the panel, plugged it in and pressed the Start button.  The computer started up normally.    I moved the computer back to its place on my desk, hooked up monitor and keyboard and pressed the Start button again.  The cooling fans roared for about five seconds and then everything went quiet.   Another four or five tries produced the same result, leaving me again without access to Phot ..read more

 The f2/38mm lens on the Pen-FT continues to impress me with its performance in a wide variety of situations. I met three of my fellow film photographers for coffee at a shop on Central in Albuquerque.  The half-frame vertical format encourages this kind of composite of adjacent frames. I've shot about ten rolls of Kentmere in the Olympus Pen-FT now, and it and the fine F.Zuiko lens have performed faultlessly.  I am, however, hearing some faint grumbling comments coming from the cabinet holding my other old cameras about neglect.  I'm out of 35mm film at the moment, b ..read more

  There are a lot of people collecting vintage photo gear these days.   Not many make the old cameras sing like these two:   Rick Drawbridge on Photo.net SBA73  From Catalunya on Flickr ..read more

 Margaret made a deep dive into the clutter on her desk and turned up this photo made beside the corral of our house in King Hill.  I don't recall the details of this bow, but the size seems to suit her.  I would have still been shooting my 30# Fred Bear brought from San Francisco.  Must have been a drugstore print as I was not doing any film processing in those days, and certainly no scanning.  The camera could only have been our Spotmatic ..read more