Autumn at the farmhouse Minolta Maxxum 7000i, 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 Minolta AF Zoom Fujifilm Fujicolor 200 2020
At the rate I’m going, my review of the Minolta Maxxum 7000i won’t show up here until January. But I wanted to show you this photo from it now.
Within my subdivision, a few houses still lurk that predate it. This old farmhouse is one of them. I gather that this subdivision was built on land owned by the Ottinger family; was this the Ottinger farmhouse?
Tree tunnel in autumn Olympus OM-2n, 50mm f/3.5 Zuiko Auto Macro Fujifilm Superia X-tra 400 2020
It’s been about six weeks since my last bike ride. I don’t like to ride when temperatures are below about 60 degrees, which they have been except for one or two days during this time. When it looks like warmer days are over, I hang up the bike.
On my final ride of the season I brought my Olympus OM-2n along. One particular route of about eight miles takes me down some beautiful country roads here in southeastern Boone County. This tree tunnel is on one of those roads.
I recently got decent results developing 120 Ilford FP4 Plus in LegacyPro L110, Dilution B (1+31). The more I use this Kodak HC-110 developer clone, the more I like it. Meet my colleague Ishank.
And this is Trent. We met for lunch Downtown on a warm autumn day. A particular cheeseburger joint has plenty of outdoor seating.
We met for lunch on Indianapolis’s popular Massachusetts Avenue (“Mass Ave,” we all call it). We met on the block in the photo below thinking we’d hit the fried chicken place, but we learned that during COVID they’re not serving lunch. So we walked up the street and found the cheeseburger place open.
In many shots, blacks went to 100% and there was no detail available to retrieve in Photoshop. Areas of Ishank’s hair, beard, and T-shirt came out fully black. In the photo below, note especially the side of the truck in the foreground, and the slacks of the woman in the mural.
I probably underexposed those photos. I should have metered for the shadows, especially in the photo above where the light is so mixed. Instead, I started the meter app on my iPhone, aimed it at the middle of the scene, and set the Yashica-D to whatever it said. I would do well to be more disciplined in my metering technique. Fortunately, my hasty technique worked fine in even lighting, as in the scene below.
I shot these in my Yashica-D. I use my Yashica-12 more often because of its built-in meter and easy crank winding. But the D is still a lovely camera. Its Yashikor lens, a triplet, gives a lovely swirly bokeh (see the portraits above) that the 12’s Yashinon lens, a Tessar clone, can’t match. People in the photo forums decry the Yashikor’s softness compared to the Yashinon, but I find the Yashikor to be plenty sharp.
Speaking of sharpness, I continue to learn so much from your comments. On my recent post about Kodak Panatomic-X film, Ted Marcus recommended deconvolution sharpening over unsharp masking. I searched the Internet for more info and learned that you can do it natively in Photoshop’s RAW editor. This article explains. I like the effect better than unsharp masking. The real test will come when I try it on 35mm scans.
I took the Yashica-D on a drive one chilly lunch hour and stopped in some familiar places. If I had known that fellow was going to bike into my frame, I would have waited a second or two longer so he would have appeared in a more interesting spot!
I like shooting 12-exposure rolls of film when I’m shooting aimlessly like this. One good photo walk, or two or three short photo walks, and its into the developing tank with the roll. It also reminds me of my early days making photos in my little Kodak Brownie Starmite II and later in my crappy Imperial Magimatic X50. I had no choice but 12 exposures in the Brownie on 127 film. I could buy 20- (and later 24-) exposure 126 cartridges for the Magimatic, but often bought 12-exposure cartridges because they were less expensive. I had so little money then. I hadn’t worked out yet that it was more economical per frame to buy the 20-exposure cartridges, especially when you factored in developing and printing.
On what was probably one of the last warm afternoons of the year, I rode my bike on my usual Indiana cornfield route.
County Road 700 recently got a fresh layer of asphalt. The farmer along this stretch of road has begun to mow down his cornstalks, which have turned brown with age. Over the road, that one branch has started to turn red and orange.
Folks, this is about as Indiana as it gets this time of year!
I made this photo a couple weeks ago when we still had summer temperatures. It’s cooled off considerably since then; some days, the high has been just 60 degrees.
Riding my bike feels like freedom. At its best, a bike ride requires no prep. In whatever I’m wearing, I just get on and go! The colder it gets, the more cold-weather gear I need to put on to ride. It’s not that big of a deal to put on a coat and gloves, though I do grumble about it. Eventually it gets too cold for my face, though, and I’ve never found a solution that I have been willing to put up with.
On this early September day I was riding through the cornfields that begin less than a mile north of my home. County Road South 700 East makes a quick jog to the left around an old farm boundary, leading to this scene of a barn in the middle of a cornfield.
As I’ve gone on long bike rides out into the country this summer, I’m struck by how many barns have dates on them from 100 or more years ago.
I admire the stability of the farms these barns represent. I wish I could have had that kind of stability in my life. Instead, I chose badly the first time I got married, and after that marriage ended I fell in love again and remarried. I’ve lived in far more places than I ever anticipated. Everything about my life has felt temporary.
My parents, in contrast, bought a home in 1976 and lived in it until 2014. I always thought that’s just how my life would go, too. Alas.
