I went out for a walk along the Rio Grande just before sundown. A Bald Eagle was flying home along the far bank of the river, almost out of reach of my 70-200 mm zoom lens at 200 mm. The Sandhill Cranes were flying in for the night looking like bombers in formation as they flew overhead. As I made my way back home through the bosque, a lone crow sat on top of a branch watching the last bit of pink before it faded into the gray dusk.
“Did you see the pink sunrise the other morning?” I was asked during a conversation about rain, snow and Sandhill Cranes.
We got a little over 1/4 inch of rain last night, while the Sandias got snow. I went out into the freezing wind around 11:30 AM to get photos of the snow covered, cloud capped Sandias from different locations in Corrales. However, the last panorama was taken at sunset from Rio Rancho.
We had a thin cloud cover most of the day Friday that produced muted light that colored everything with a grayish tint. The cranes had already flown off by the time I got to the riverbank at sunrise, but they flew back to the river at sunset.
Winter sunset.
Continuing my adventures in film, I purchased a 4X5 Speed Graphic, Press Camera with money I got for my birthday. I wanted a 4X5 that was more portable, but since field cameras are still pricey, I started looking at press cameras, and decided I liked having the choice of using either the leaf shutter in the lens or the focal plane shutter in the body, and having the option to hand hold the camera.
I ended up with this particular camera because the seller guaranteed that everything worked, and he accepted my offer for the amount of the money I received for my birthday. I got it Wednesday, checked the shutters, the movements, the rangefinders, and indeed everything worked. It was pretty dirty, including the lens, so I took the camera and lens apart, and cleaned everything inside and out. Spunk helped and then participated when I photographed the camera — he wanted to point out the camera’s features and how it works. I looked up the serial numbers on the lens and the camera and it’s a Wartime model produced in 1945.
Thursday morning I went out and took four photos, processed them, and then printed two of the negatives before we went to Thanksgiving dinner at Laurie’s parent’s house in the early afternoon. I used Kodak Tri-X 320, but had the light meter set at ISO 400 and processed the film at ISO 400. I used the leaf shutter in the lens set at 1/400 sec and hand held the camera for the shots. The lens, at 127mm, is fairly wide-angle for a 4X5, therefore, in each photo I was trying to get as close to a group of cranes, and then a group of ducks as possible. The cranes and ducks flew so I snapped the photos of them taking flight, producing my first 4×5, hand-held actions shots.
Despite the beautiful display of morning and evening colors, the rest of yesterday was not good. A cold, strong wind blew all day, and one of Tristan’s tenants put regular dish soap in the dishwasher, and that drove the final nail into the coffin of the dishwasher that Tristan had been nursing along, hoping to get more life out of it. Since we don’t use our dishwasher, I pulled it out from under the counter, disconnected everything, loaded it in the truck and drove it Tristan’s — that was after I coaxed, or more like tricked, the truck into starting. It does not like to start in the cold. One would think pulling a dishwasher out should be a relatively simple task, but no, it wasn’t, and the beast fought me every step of the way. Fortunately, I had lots of help from Spunk and Laurie which made things a little easier.
Murphy’s Law was in top form when I started working on replacing dishwashers at Tristan’s. When I looked under the kitchen sink for the shutoff valve to the water supply, everything was wet. There were two leaky lines that had been dripping for who knows how long. After I got the replacement dishwasher hooked up, the water connection at the dishwasher was now dripping as well. The old copper compression gasket wasn’t seating properly to the new connection. I made a run to Home Depot, where I learned that I couldn’t buy compression gaskets, because we are not supposed use 3/8 copper supply lines anymore. So I had to buy a dishwasher kit with a new flexible supply line (better) but it was just barely long enough, and it included a bunch of parts I didn’t need.
Replacing the supply line to the dishwasher fixed one of the leaks under the sink, but the other one was at a plastic connector that the tech who installed a water filtration system in the house used to connect the cold water to the filter. The copper wasn’t playing well with the plastic and it hadn’t seated properly. I pulled hard on the copper tubing like I was trying to pull it out of the plastic connector. That seemed to finally seat the copper better with the plastic, because it stopped leaking; however, bumping something against the connector might make it start leaking again.
As the French say “les choses sont contre nous”, and everything seemed against us today. At least the the beautiful colors of dawn and dusk were a good reminder that things are not really all that bad.
Visitors and Volunteers at Ranchos de las Golodrinas.
Off Center & Not Even 