The folk dance group, Baila Baila, puts on an elaborate show each year in Old Town during the Balloon Fiesta with children in traditional Mexican costumes and a lot of makeup.  The large number of participants offers many opportunities for photographers.

 and some other stuff.

I saw some nice work on the Facebook Pen-F group done on Kentmere processed in Ilfosol 3.  I wanted to see how that combination compared to what I get with developing in PMK Pyro.  I thought the results weren't bad, but they don't seem to me to be quite as nice in regard to tonality and fine grain.  I'm thinking I may try the Ilfosol 3 with some medium format Fomapan next.

One needs to get out early in the day now to find tolerable shooting conditions.  My walk around Tingley Ponds took me up close to noon and I only had the energy to snap one picture on Kentmere 400 in my No.1A Pocket Kodak.

I took an early morning walk around Old Town and managed to finish off the roll.

 I needed some color film to shoot on Cinco de Mayo, so I dug around in the film drawer of the refrigerator and turned up a roll of Kodak Professional 400UC.  There was no box, so no date.  I looked it up and found that 400UC was discontinued in 2009!  I loaded it in my Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim, which would mean a shutter speed of 1/100 at f11.  There was no officially scheduled event for the day in Old Town, but I was pretty sure some of the old car guys would show up.

Since I didn't know if anything was actually being recorded on the film I decided I might as well shoot the whole roll while walking around Old Town, looking for anything bright and colorful.    My Cinestill C-41 had already processed at least sixteen rolls; so I give the 400UC some extra time, eight minutes at 95C.  The negatives needed a bit of color and levels adjustment, but I thought the old film wore its age well.

  We came to live in Albuquerque not long after the celebration of its 300th birthday.  That was apparent from the numerous plaques and commemorative manhole covers proclaiming the event.  This year was the city's 317th, which provided the occasion for a celebration in Old Town.  No flamenco this time, but the Baila Baila folclorico group put on a nice dance performance.

 I walked through the neighborhood and into Old Town with my Kodak Flash Bantam.  The camera was built for paper backed 828 roll film.  That is the same size as 35mm without the double row of perforations, so I just rolled a strip of 35mm onto the little reels in the dark bag and covered the ruby window with tape.  One and one half rotations of the advance gave me pretty good frame spacing. I had a few overlapping frames and a couple double exposures, but the camera got the job done pretty well.

The film was some Agfa Vista 100 dated 2007.  I gave it a little extra time in the Cinestill C-41 developer, but there were still some pretty pronounced color shifts requiring photoshop correction.

 Our local film photography group met at a park near our home and then went to one of the Old Town coffee shops.  I took along my Leica IIIa with the Elmar 3.5/50.

The Fiftieth in fact.  A couple flew over my house, and that would have been enough for me having photographed about fifteen instances of the yearly event.

I turned out that some friends wanted to chase down some balloons the next day, so we hopped into the car and headed north toward the launch site.  To my surprise we encountered little traffic and ended up finding an ideal viewing location a mile south of the Balloon Museum.  I got a few pictures with both the Pentax ME Super using Kentmere 400 and the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim loaded with outdated Kodak ColorPlus 200.

At noon on the same day I went down to the Plaza Vieja to catch my favorite part of the Balloon Fiesta, the performance of the Flamenco dancers from Albuquerque's International School of Flamenco.  At the balloon viewing site the Pentax ME Super had developed a problem with the film advance, and that only got worse when I tried to use it to shoot some pictures of the dancers.

It was only when I developed the film from the Pentax that I could see the main problem was that the shutter was often firing at the end of the advance stroke, producing a variety of unexpected results.  I made a few shots with the vuws of the dancers preparing to perform, but was disappointed I could not catch the dancers performing under the shade of the gazebo.

A Google search showed that film advance problems are not uncommon in the ME Super.  I'll open up the camera to see if it looks fixable, though I don't think I would trust it again for critical work.  Fortunately, I also have a Pentax ME which seems to be working fine, and I'm not exactly lacking in other options.

* * *

As often happens, Margaret got the best shot of the day with her cellphone camera:

The fine Spring weather has brought the old cars back to the Plaza Vieja in Old Town.

The stylish little Bilora Bella offers some basic controls over aperture, speed and focusing, and it makes maximal use of the 127 format, producing negative images that measure 4x6.5cm.  That is nearly three times the size of the 35mm format, although the camera is no bigger than a compact 35.

+That is nearly three times the size offered by the 35mm format though the camera is no larger than a compact 35.  

I am able to shoot my 127 cameras using some old bulk Portra 160 which I roll into backing paper from a couple defunct film brands.  I am always a little surprised to get eight mostly ok images from such an effort as fumbling in the dark through the process of getting the film properly onto the little 127 reels seems a real hit-or-miss project.