A tale of two photos - or how I manage to learn very little from photography

 Recently, I had the two Spotmatics in my possession, an SP-1000, and an SPII, CLA'd by Eric Hendrickson, the acknowledge Pentax master repairman. According to Eric's web page, he has been repairing Spotmatics since 1969.  That was when I was, uh, three.  Who knows how much longer he will be at it, but his work is still top notch.

I inherited them from a dear friend of mine, Paige Pinnell, when he passed away.  In full disclosure, he did not will them to me, but his partner gave them to me when I stopped by the estate sale after his death. Some of Paige's photographs are here on the Obscura Gallery web page. 

Whenever I go backpacking, I tend to grab the Olympus OM-1n.  It's small and lightweight.  I've been using the Pentax a lot, trying to convince myself to take it on my upcoming trip to the Grand Canyon.  It's still undecided.  They both take great photos, but... the Olympus is just that much lighter and more compact, but is it boring to have all your photos of a place you backpack taken by a single camera? Would the Pentax reveal different characteristics of the canyon?  I won't know if I have the Pentax with me on the trip until I am in my friend's car on Sunday morning.  Paige used to argue with me that the Pentax lenses were better than the Olympus lenses.  I have not convinced myself it is so, and Paige is no longer around to argue with.

I noticed on my last two rolls of film that I shot an almost identical scene on a section of trail heading up Atalaya Mountain on the edge of Santa Fe.  I like the tonal qualities of this one:

I shot this photo using the Super Takumar 24 mm lens.  I was using Ilford's FP4+ pushed to 250, and I developed it in Diafine.  I like Diafine because it is long lasting and is not fussy about temperature.  I can get neurotic trying to keep the temperature of my developer at 68 degrees. Our house seems to be always in the low sixties in the winter and the mid-eighties in the summer.  In the past, I have felt the Diafine left my photos looking a little washed out, but the darks are nice and dark in this scan.  I will say that I have no patience and no skill with adjusting scanned photos on the computer after I scan them.  I scan them, and what I end up with, I end up with.  I'm a lazy photographer.  My past rolls developed with Diafine were HP 5+ pushed to 800.  Is the scan simply darker because of the film? Is it because it was shot with the Pentax, rather than with the Nikon FA, with a crappy series E lens? I don't know.

Almost exactly a week later, I took this photograph from slightly farther back on the trail, resulting in better composition of the photograph:

It was a windy day, and there was a dust storm down by Albuquerque, so the Sandia Mountains were obscured.  In this case, I shot the photograph with the SMC Takumar 28mm lens.  I was using Kentmere Pan 200, and I developed it in FPP 110, (the Film Photography Project's HC 110 doppelganger).

It's still a nice photograph, but I like the darker shadow under the rock on the first one.  Was it because of the film?  Was it because of the developer?  Did I slightly underexpose the first negative or slightly overexpose the second?  It's always hard, I find, to get the needle on the meter of the Pentax SPII to come to rest exactly in the middle.

I realized, in looking at these two photographs, that I have accumulated very little actionable knowledge over my years of shooting film.  I have a sense of what I would like to achieve - I like sharp contrast, and I like the dark areas to be very dark, like in Paula Bown's famous portrait of Samuel Beckett. However, I am always changing too many variables each time I shoot, to really learn what results in the type of photograph I am trying to achieve.  I know that some of that can be achieved in the printing, but I find that I am really too busy to spend much time in the darkroom making prints.  (I had never realized how time consuming and fussy making prints could be, with all the test strips, and the filters, and on and on.)  When I go out to shoot, I should focus on varying fewer variables!  I've tried, at times, to keep a notebook with details about each shot.  I wish I could keep up with being that compulsive, but such intentions rarely last beyond a frame or two. At any rate, I enjoy what I do, even if I do not understand how I arrived at the results.

That's not much bike content.  Here's a brief update.  I just replaced the tires on the Happy Little Three Speed.  The rear one was beginning to split.  I always use Schwalbe Marathons, except when I don't, and then I am reminded that I buy the Schwalbes because they are pretty good against the goatheads out here.  I like riding the Happy Little Three Speed to work, and it is my usual bike.  I've also started to cover it with stickers - Urban Adventure League, Society of Three Speeds, Film Photography Project, various stickers from various pubs, Meher Baba stickers, Mountain Cloud Zen Center stickers.  Usually I don't put stickers on anything, but I'm having fun stickering up my bike.  I ride the Raleigh occasionally, and I recently replaced the Rivendell's drop bars with moustache bars and bar end shifters.  I like the shifters on the downtube, but when I had a camera slung on my back, every time I reached down to shift, the camera would shift around toward my front.  I ride and enjoy all my bikes, but the Happy Little Three Speed still reigns as the main mode of transportation.