I’m Such an ID10T

My wife had the Ohio Association of School Nurses conference this past weekend in Huron, Ohio, near Lake Erie. She just got back from a week long trip to attend school nurses conferences in St. Louis and Portland, Oregon. It was a long week for her with lots of time spent in airports and day-long meetings. I volunteered to pick her up from the airport and drive her to the meeting in Huron. I also wanted to spend my time shooting photos on Kelleys Island and Marblehead, OH. Which I did.

Saturday morning dawned bright with puffy white clouds and morning sunshine. It was a 40-minute drive from our hotel to the Miller’s Ferry in Marblehead to take me to the island. They morning was cold and windy, with gusts of wind out of Canada at about 10-20 mph, so the water on the lake was pretty choppy.

I got to the ferry landing at about 7:45 for an 8:00am departure. I was in the first lane waiting for the ferry and ahead of me was a very large cement truck heading to the island for a job. Behind me was a second cement truck. The ferry boat was not that big, but I figured that they had done tons of these runs and we weren’t going to sink to the bottom of the lake.

Let me explain that I’m not a seafaring man. I did ride on a ferry from the state of Washington to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. I’ve been on a couple of Caribbean cruises. Those were all big boats. This was a pretty small ferry boat, and did I mention the water was a little choppy?

My spot on the ferry was first in line on the far right side up near the bow. Now, if you have read my blog entries, you know that I’m always looking for the irony or silliness in the situation, so, as I’m sitting in my truck I needed a good song to set the stage for my ferry ride. There’s really only one song that was fitting to this event–Gordon Lightfoot’s song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I mean, really, what other song would you have played?

Despite my whistling through the graveyard, I made it to the island without the main hatch caving in and the cook telling me, “fellas it’s been nice to know you.”

I spend the next four hours touring the island and taking photos. I brought my Pentax 645NII medium format camera for the day. I really love shooting with that camera.

You’re probably asking, but how are you an ID10T? I’m getting to that.

So I shoot two rolls of film, the first is Kodak Portra 400 120mm, the second is Fujifilm Velvia 100. I really like Portra for the color it renders in it’s images. I’ve shot Velvia before and I love the rich colors it provides. Because this is April there really aren’t any tourists there, so I’m pretty much by myself (continuing my theme from Albuquerque, NM). I got what I think are some amazing images. Just unique slices of life on the island.

We got home today about 2:30pm, so I go set up to develop the Portra. I have a sous vide heater that I use to stabilize the temperature of the chemistry and the developing tank. I recently bought two stainless steel 120mm reels and a stainless developing tank. Note to anyone developing their own 120mm film–the plastic reels that you can use to load the film just don’t work for me. Once I got the stainless steel reels, getting the film onto the reel is so much easier.

Everything is ready to go, I get into the dark and load the bottom reel with the exposed film, seal it up and I’m ready to develop. I take it down to the basement darkroom and get ready to go. I go to pop the cap off of the lid to start with a water rinse, and I realize that instead of taking off the cap, I pulled the entire lid off of the developing tank. I had let my attention wander for a moment checking to make sure that the chemistry was at the exact temperature I needed for development. The developing tank was directly under the light that sits above the sink. And after a second, I realize my mistake! I slapped the lid back on. I tell myself, “Self, the reel with the film is on the bottom of the tank. There weren’t that many photons that got down that far, right? It won’t be fogged?”

So I stepped out of my body and looked at myself and said, “You are an ID10T. You just ruined one of the rolls of film you shot, and it had such amazing images on it. People from all over the world would be marveling at the profound and utterly glorious images that you had on that roll.” That part of myself is a little pompous and full of himself.

I decided to go ahead and develop the film. What did I have to loose, right? Maybe those photons didn’t make it to the bottom of the tank. Maybe they all decided to go watch HGTV with the rest of my family (they like Home Town and Beach House Bargain Hunters). But, unfortunately, the film was totally fogged and ruined. I still have the Velvia to process, but I need to get an E6 developing kit for that.

The moral of this story is always stay in the moment when you are processing your film because if your mind strays just a little bit, you can ruin the next award-winning National Geographic quality images that you shot that day.

So have you every had a ID10T accident? What did you do and were you able to recover from it?

Albuquerque Day 1

What a whirlwind of a day. So many highs and lows–It started out with me traveling to Sandia Crest, the highest peak of the Sandia mountain range. The drive from our hotel takes about 47 minutes and the road up the mountain is a twisty-turny carnival ride. At one point a pair of turkeys crossed in front of me. They weren’t anything like the brown turkeys that we have in Ohio. These were more white than brown, which makes sense given that there was still a lot of snow on the ground once you got pretty far up.

The peak is about 10,000 feet up and your ears pop a lot on the way up and down. At the bottom of the mountain the temp was about 40º F, by the time I got to the peak it was 32º with a very stiff wind blowing across the peaks. There was so much snow still there that the door to the ranger station was obstructed by about 4-5 feet of snow.

The views from that spot are amazing.

From there, I went to the Petroglyph National Monument park. This area is very much part of the desert. There are a couple of different trails, one of them is pretty strenuous, the other one (the one I chose) is less strenuous, but still not a simple hike of about 2.2 Miles. From Ice to Fire. It was pretty hot in the valley where the petroglyphs are. These are carvings that native Americans and some of the Spanish settlers made into the basalt rocks scattered around the area. According to the literature, the carvings were made somewhere between 1100 AD through the 1700s. Many of the carvings are of animals — birds, small local animals in the area, or pictures of hands, and mythical people.

This was a quick shot using my iPhone. When I get my film developed and scanned I can add them to this posting.

My last stop for the day was at the Salinas Pueblo Missions national park. This site is located outside Mountainair, NM, about an hour drive south of Albuquerque. I wish I had time to go back to see it in the daytime. I really wanted to get some great astro photography shots, but the moon was too bright and it really threw off my ability to get the sky really dark with lots of stars. I got one shot that I really like.

Traveling to New Mexico

Kate and I traveled to New Mexico. She had an Executive Council meeting there, and I went to spend the time shooting photos. I’ve never been to New Mexico and I’ve wanted to travel to the Southwest part of the US to see the country there. I wasn’t disappointed.

The day before we were supposed to fly to New Mexico, I was checking in for the flight but kept getting a message that my flight had been cancelled. I thought that I had accidentally cancelled it. I spoke with customer support from United and the agent told me that it had been automatically canceled because the ticket had never been issued. Kate called the travel agent that she used and we found out that she had never finalized the tickets. She was able to get us on a United flight but it cost her a lot of money since it was so last minute.

Beyond that, we made our flight and arrived there about 12:30pm. As we were collecting our luggage we ran into two of the board members coming to the meeting here. I had rented a car so we played a quick game of tetris to get all the luggage into a Jeep Renegade. Somehow we managed. After getting checked in and unpacked, we all piled back in the Jeep and headed to Old Town, the oldest part of the Albuquerque. It’s a really cool area of the city with lots of old buildings and shops. with a small park there. We tooled around for a while and stopped for a cold drink. Then back to the hotel to meet the rest of the people attending. I’ll write more about that in another posting. I went back down to Old Town by myself with my Speed Graphic 4×5 camera to take some photos.

I got a couple of shots with my Pentax camera, we’ll see how they turn out once I get home and develop all of the film.