Over two years ago they said “Give up your parking spaces, a grocery store is at hand!” And the city took out the bumpers, fenced the lot, and the lot sat empty. And yet no grocery store. A year went by, and they used it for a staging area to finish the multi-colored apartments across the street. And yet no grocery store. With the apartments finished, the fences came down, “No Parking” signs went up, and yet no grocery store. People started parking on the periphery and then in the still empty lot. And yet no grocery store. The “No Parking” signs disappeared, more parked cars, movie studios set up staging one day and disappear the next. Another year gone by, and yet no grocery store. Then came Monday’s announcement of the ground breaking for the new grocery store on Tuesday. Yesterday was gloomy and cold as the people gathered and the politicians and business representatives gave their speeches. Shovels ready, cameras rolling, the grocery store is at hand. Hooray! Let the destruction begin.
The tree is down and the apartments are finished. A similar day as yesterday in the lot behind the office over a year ago.
The Mayor in the middle.
Liz celebrating the apocryphal news of the grocery store almost three years ago.
The last frame #24 on the roll of film affected by light leaks in the film canister.
I bought some Cine Film re-engineered for 35mm to be developed by standard C41 process. This is a high speed tungsten film normally used for cinematography. I had put the roll of film in my Canon F1 intending to shoot film along with digital of the fashion show at Gears & Glamour. However, since the fashion show was in the dark, and I hadn’t worked with the film before, I didn’t want to push it beyond its recommended ISO 800 until I had used it. Since this film is best used indoors or at night under tungsten street lighting, I only took a few shots in the well lighted prep area at Gears & Glamour, a few more at the West Side Chorale’s winter concert, and then decided to use it outdoors with a 600 mm lens. I knew the color would be off in daylight, but I wanted to see how well I could hand hold a 600 mm lens with high speed film.
I got a surprise when I got to the end of the roll of film. I noticed the advance didn’t stop, and when I tried rewinding the film, the knob turned freely. I advanced the film a couple more times to see it would stop — it didn’t, so I took the camera into the darkroom, opened it in the dark and carefully felt by the take-up spool, and discovered the film had not been secured to the spool in the canister. I took out the canister, and as carefully as I could opened it up with a can opener. I carefully pulled the film out of the camera, but when the last of it popped off the take-up spool, the coiled mess of film slipped from my hands and fell to the floor. Remember, I’m in total darkness, so I bent down, felt around at my feet, found the pile of film, gently picked it up, found an end to the film, found the spool from the canister and rewound the film back onto the spool. I put the spool back in the canister and forced the end cap back onto the canister. When I got the negatives back, the canister didn’t seal back up tightly around the edges after opening it (I had suspected as much), so the last frames on the roll had light leaks. This was a mystery, because the last frames should be on the inside of the spool and the first frames on the outside where they would be affected by light leaks in the seal around the outer edge of the end cap. Then I remembered dropping the film, so I must have rolled it back on the spool reverse of how the photos were taken.
The lead photo is frame 24, the last image taken, and the effect of the light leaks from being on the outer edge in the canister are pretty interesting. The rest of the images, shown in order taken, were not affected by the leaks on the edge of the canister.
Frame 1 at Gears & Glamour with no effect from the light leak in the canister
Frame 8 at the Winter Concert
Frame 12 of coyotes on the other side of the river.
Frame 18 of a Blue Heron on a sandbar in the river.
In “Squalo” there are a couple of women painted up as skeletons who dance in the darkness for a few seconds at various times throughout the video. Spunk would start pawing at the skeleton figures every time they came on screen. I wonder how he sees the figures that makes him want to touch them.
I put on another Italian music video, but Spunk lost interest soon after it began, jumped down and started playing with his toys on the floor. When I replayed “Sensi”, he bounded across the room, slid up to the computer and intently watched the video again — he seemed to be enamored by Anna.
I went to Gears and Glamour on Saturday night at Thunderbird Harley Davidson. The event was a fundraiser for Ability Connection New Mexico, an organization that provides services for people with disabilities to help them achieve their highest level of independence. The event included live music, a runway fashion show, and the morning show hosts from Coyote 102.5, Erica Viking and the Hoff. It was an interesting and fun event, the problem was, most of the event was in the dark, including the runway fashion show that had one bank of spotlights lighting the runway from behind, backlighting the models on the main runway. I was up for the challenge of shooting in the dark. Since I didn’t have a flash with me, I didn’t want to photograph the models backlit on the main runway, so I stood by the band to get the models lighted from the side and front on the side runway, and then lighted again from the front on their way back down the main runway. I set my ISO to 3200, lens wide open and my shutter on 1/60 of a sec, which underexposed each shot from 2 to 4 stops. With a lot of post processing, I got the photos to work pretty well. The models in the lead photo asked me to photograph them on the bike, but the only light was from the sign behind them. The photo was almost completely black, besides the sign, so I simply over processed it to give a vintage look.
Katie with Ability Connection, the Hoff and Erica Viking with the Morning Show on Coyote 102.5
The animals I saw at Ranchos de las Golondrinas were alpaca, horses, shetland ponies (not pictured), burros, sheep and donkeys. The burro was hitched up to a mill they used to squeeze the juice out of sorghum cane to make molasses. Throughout its history villagers would have also raised pigs, chickens, cows and goats at Las Golondrinas.
Marble Brewing Company, http://www.marblebrewery.com, is another award winning craft brewery in Albuquerque. Awarded the 2014 Great American Beer Festival Small Brewing Company Brewer of the Year award by the Brewers Association, they have an impressive operation with the brewing, tap room and bottling all on site at the corner of Marble and 1st Street near downtown Albuquerque. A food truck was parked on the street serving hamburgers and French fries to the patrons spending their lunch or a leisurely Friday afternoon at the brewery.
I took the title for today’s blog off of Leah Black’s business card. She is the events & social media coordinator for Marble, and a pro at drawing drafts. After Ben interviewed Ted Rice (head of Marble) for The Beer Trale, http://www.thebeertrale.com, Leah was very accommodating and allowed us to roam freely in the brewhouse to observe, film and photograph the operation.
Off Center & Not Even 