Some subjects draw me in every time I pass by with a camera. This scene on Main Street in Zionsville has become one of those subjects. I am sure I have at least one more photo from here, but I can’t find it now. Enjoy these five.
Happy Father’s Day to all you fathers! Tomorrow, I mean. Except that it’s Father’s Day at my house today because this is the day my sons could come over. Here’s some light reading to tide the rest of you over to tomorrow.
💻 Suzanne Lucas is an expat in Switzerland and sometimes she writes about how life works there. This time she wrote about how pharmacies and doctors’ offices work. It’s interesting stuff. ReadSwiss Saturday: The Pharmacy
💻 Susie Trexler visited the building in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln practiced law and brought us pictures. Painted signs on the building’s exterior were recently restored. ReadLincoln’s Law Office: Bringing Ghost Signs Back to Life
📷 It’s a camera from the former East Germany — quirky, but well built and a surprisingly good performer. Theo Panagopolous reviews the Prakti. ReadPrakti – Early prakticalities
📷 Have you ever seen any of your work stolen on the Internet? Johnny Martyr has some good advice about what to do when it happens. ReadBattling Copyright Infringement
Kids today don’t know how good they have it, with Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network delivering animation to their living rooms 24x7x365. During my 1970s-80s childhood, we got cartoons on Saturday mornings and for an hour after school, and that was it. My brother and I liked animation so much that we’d rise early on Saturday morning to not miss a single show.
We started on Channel 16 because they aired the Japanese anime Battle of the Planets right after sign on. Channel 16, WNDU-TV, was our local NBC station. We had no idea how unusual it was that it was owned by the University of Notre Dame. All we knew was that during sign-on they played a recording of University President Father Theodore Hesburgh reading of the Prayer for Peace of St. Francis of Assisi.
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood, as to understand; To be loved, as to love; For it is in giving that we receive, It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
I heard that recording so often that even today I can recite most of this prayer from memory. I haven’t heard that recording in 30 years until someone recently uploaded a 1985 sign-off that included it. Here it is!
I wasn’t raised in the faith. What I saw of Christians as a kid tended to repel me. (Here’s a story about how.) But hearing Father Hesburgh read this gentle prayer on those Saturday mornings gave me hope that perhaps somewhere people lived their faith in these ways. That’d be a faith worth following. When I sought God, I looked for him in people this quiet and humble.
If you have a meter that reads EVs rather than just aperture and shutter speed, then you might really enjoy the Kodak Retina IIc. I did. My updated review is here.
How fortunate I’ve been these last couple years to live so close to Zionsville’s charming downtown. It’s just a short drive to enjoy the boutiques and galleries and restaurants.
We make good use of Zionsville’s Main Street. On the morning I’m writing this my wife and I are waking up after an impromptu and deeply enjoyed night on the little town. Often when family comes to visit we stroll this brick street and pop into whatever shops are open. It’s always a lovely time. I bring a camera, naturally. That’s how I made this photograph. This potter’s work is always for sale in this particular gallery.
How improbable Zionsville’s Main Street is to me, lined with these perfect little shops that are seldom busy. At any random time I’m in town, several of them aren’t even open. I wonder how any of them turn a profit.
Together, my wife and I are in the top five percent of earners nationwide. (It takes surprisingly little to join that club.) Yet I am sure we are in the bottom quarter of earners in Zionsville. There’s serious money here.
I assume these shops are run by people whose families have plenty of money. Nobody’s counting on these boutiques to pay the mortgage and feed the children. As long as their shops break even, they’re fine.
How is it that I’ve been back into film photography for 13 years but have never shot Kodak’s Portra 400? My 2018 EMULSIVE Secret Santa gave me the nudge I needed by dropping two rolls into the gift box she sent.
As I’ve seen others shoot Portra 400, some use it as a general-purpose color film and others find it most useful for photos that involve people. I don’t often shoot people. I tend to shoot things that don’t move. Like cemeteries. And flowers. In cemeteries.
I had been shooting my Nikomat FTn and decided to keep at it for this roll. I had my 50mm f/2 Nikkor H-C lens mounted. Portra gave me just enough exposure room to shoot inside, albeit with shallow depth of field.
I can’t decide whether I think the colors are muted or not. So many people have said Portra’s colors are muted that I don’t trust my judgment. I see muted colors in these books, but that might be because the books’ colors are genuinely muted. The magnolia flowers and the American flag above don’t look muted to me. Are the greens below muted? I want to say no, but I also can’t recall how vivid the scene was in real life.
I don’t notice grain in these photos at this size, but I do when I look at them at full scan size. It’s neither pleasing nor disruptive. It’s workmanlike grain, faint and unobtrusive. However, I scanned these on my flatbed scanner. Lab scans might have made the grain even harder to detect.
The Portra was at its best at early evening, the sun in that golden-hour sweet spot.
Portra 400 is a very good film. I haven’t pixel-peeped to be sure, but it might have the least obtrusive grain of all the fast color films I’ve shot.
But the film I use most, Fujicolor 200, suits me fine and costs a lot less.
My EMULSIVE Secret Santa sent me two rolls of Portra 400, so sooner or later I’ll put the other one through a camera. I shot it at box speed this time, so next time perhaps I’ll shoot it at EI 200. Several photo bloggers I follow get really nice results when they do that.
