Statues at the Huntington Library Botanic Garden

 A few more images of statues at the Huntington Library Botanic Garden. These I developed today on the 20th Century Camera film developing reel. I am so glad I have this reel, my negatives came out much cleaner. 

Household images on the Busch Pressman

 More strategies to copy with extreme psychological stress: taking photos with my 4x5 Busch Pressman. It has been a long time since I took any photos with this camera, and I was suspecting something was wrong with my mounting of the lens. I never get good images when I do closeups of flowers. I had to try again, and also, try out the new 20th Century Camera 4x5 developing reel. 

I went out and took two holders with Fomapan 100 film. First image was another closeup of a flower, but I screwed up and ruined the image because the damn holder will not stay flush with the back. It has not screws to attach it. I took another images, and this time, I did get the flower.

Next, move to another plant in my back yard to photograph mom's flowers. This time, when I inserted the dark slide, I pulled out the film. It was not loaded correctly. I ruined another frame. Two sheets gone.

Finally, I took a shot of my sister's birdhouse hanging on the fence in the back.

And the reel is a big success, as I wrote in a prior entry! No more violet stain smeared on the negatives! I am so overjoyed by this. The negatives even seem clearer and less noisy than what I was obtaining with my B-s Reel. 

Now, if only I can do something to correct the back on my Busch Pressman so it will hold 4x5 film holders. 

A contact print from Heritage Park

 I was feeling extraordinarily stressed so my first resort was to go practice some photography. Why was I feeling more stressed than usual? Well, yesterday was the first presidential debate between Biden and the Great White Scoundrel. I didn't watch it, and I do not want to hear about what happened. I know that Fox News will crow that the scoundrel won, they have never been about impartiality, only about supporting Republican scoundrels, but I am so hoping that Biden had a creditable showing. I know it won't convince anyone, there is no middle left in America, everyone has view that are set in stone. The key to this election is turnout, we have to have a big turnout to defeat the scoundrel and remove him. That is why he has been so obsessed with voter suppression. In the meantime, I do not want to hear what happened.

I thought I would begin with a contact print. I took one of my 8x10 pinhole negatives and put it in a holder with a sheet of Arista RC Pearl Paper, and put it out in the sun for about an hour. The negative was for this image:

This negative was taken on 4x5 film with my Travelwide camera on the day it was announced that justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed away. It was taken on Arista 200 film and low and behold, I developed the negative with my new 20th Century Camera reel. No more violent stains on the negative! NO more stains! It was the reel, it wasn't the film and it wasn't the developing chemicals and it wasn't my technique, it was the damn reel! This came out extraordinarily clear. It is such a relief to find out it was the reel. Now I can have a reprieve from the developing problems I was having with 4x5 film.

This was the image with 8x10 Arista 200 film. I hate the blurriness, it seems way too excessive. It is my pinhole, I know it is. Developed in the Stearman Press 8x10 tray that I purchased from Freestyle Photo. 

This is what I obtained when I made the contact print. Wow, I didn't expect the colors, but given the Lumen prints I have made in the past, I should have. I love the colors, but the image is still blurry. I am so desperate for sharp 8x10 negatives. 

That was my temporary relief for today. I prepared a contact print and also developed some 4x5 negative. I will try to hide for a while longer since I do not want to hear about the debate last night. I am beyond desperate, but I have to survive and I have to help myself cope. These past four years have been extraordinarily stressful, and this last year, with the death of my father, more so. I have to survive. 

Fomapan negatives

 I have grown so frustrated with the violet stain on my Arista negatives that I decided I needed to try another film. I know, I know, Fomapan is supposed to be the same as Arista except for the fact that it is slightly more expensive. I was hoping that expense would translate into different quality and no violet stains on the negatives, but I guess I was wrong. Washing the negatives as I am about to develop them gives me the same green runoff, and when I finish fixing them, the green stain becomes violet as with the Arista film. I guess it is the same film, but packaged differently. 

Here are two frames I took with Fomapan 100 film, using my Travelwide 4x5 camera. I used a Red 25A filter and it was very hot and cloudless outside. The stain is there, but now, I think it is the developing reel. I will have to try the 20th Century camera reel next, just to confirm this. I wonder, however, why it doesn't stain my HP5+ negatives. It did partially stain one of my Rollei 400 negatives.

City hall. There was a homeless man with a grocery store basket watching me off to the right the whole while. 

I went to the post office to clean out my PO box and decided to take my other exposure with this church. No, there is no aurora borealis, not in the middle of a blazing hot day in southern California, it is the effect of the violet stain on the negative. 

I will try the other reel later on this week. Hopefully I am not completely exhausted. As I said in the previous entry, I need a week of rest. 

Gut-wrenching

 It has been several years since I have watched any television programs. My nieces still watch the cable news channels, the younger one watches cartoon shows and the older one watches shows with ghost stories, while my mom watches entertainment programs on the Spanish-language networks. I don't watch anything and got rid of my television set a long time ago, and I don't watch anything on the web either except for photographic videos on Youtube.

I resolved not to listen to any news whatsoever, which I don't do anyway so it was no loss except for the temptation to see programs related to the election, and not to listen to radio programs and not to read my online news sources. The crisis in Washington is worse than ever, now that we have confirmed that the current president is a tax cheat, besides being ignorant, narcissistic, malevolent and a compulsive liar. He is a tax cheat, having paid very, very little taxes in these past 10 years, yet compiling more and more wealth. The sickness I feel is the certainty I have that these revelations will have no effect whatsoever on his supporters. They adulate the idea he represents, and their support is unswaying. It will make no difference, these revelations will join the other oceans of material that attest to his deficient character, but since his supporters are invested in the idea of white supremacy, they will let it pass. I have never felt so betrayed by this country.

Yesterday I was desperate for some peace of mind. I went to the Rancho Santa Ana (also known as the California) Botanical Garden in Claremont, CA. I took about ten exposures using 4x5 Rollei 400 infrared film. The lighting was perfect for it, but no necessarily the vegetation. Many trees do not reflect infrared, it has to be the thin leaves, and of course, grass and bushes. 

I did what I could. I developed several exposures yesterday, and today I finished the other batch. Here are a few scans.

I love the expansive look of the atmosphere here. It looks ominous, I know, but also peaceful in a certain way. I feel peace when I contemplate it.

I don't know what happened to the negative. However, I love this scene with the artwork, with different samples scattered throughout the grounds. It is next to the gift center building (which is closed anyway), and I was looking for the bathroom. I am glad I tried this shot, and will have to try it again.

I remember seeing this composition and thinking it had potential. Anyone else would have left it along, but I saw the log and had to try it. 

Another peaceful scene at the botanical garden. Hopefully in the future I will catch it again, this time with clouds, preferably storm clouds. 

That is it, I was there at the garden for about two and a half hours. I have an annual membership now, so I can look forwards to several more visits, and the good thing is that I no longer need a reservation, I can just show up. Temperatures will be sky-high this week, though. We were in the upper 90s today (my car says we hit 100), which I discovered when I went out to wash my car. It is supposed to get hotter later on this week.

Tomorrow I resume my Zoom sessions. I am hoping for the best. I could really use a week off right now. 

It is getting worse

 I woke up today telling myself that I need to stop worrying. I need to stop obsessing about what is going on in Washington, and how we are sinking under a deranged president who is bringing out the worse in this country. I need to ignore the news for the next few weeks, at least until the election, and just concentrate on surviving and getting my family through. We have to make it through, and this gut-wrenching anxiety and anger is not doing me well. My sugar levels are cycling up and down, they are sky-high one hour and bellow 100 the next, and I feel as if I am suffocating. I need to just blank everything out, even when I see the white men in their trucks waving banners and flags. I need to ignore them.

To try to find some peace and healing I went again to the California Botanic Garden in Claremont. I have now bought an annual membership so I should be able to go when I want, without a reservation. It was hot today, but I knew, if I stayed at home, my mind would not be at peace, and I needed to go out.

Before I left, however, I sang Happy Birthday to my nephew via cellphone video. He doesn't understand what is going on, my youngest nephews don't, but we need to make sure they survive this white supremacist regime in Washington. We need to survive because if I don't calm myself, I will be having the same panic attacks my niece is having.

I arrived at the Botanic Garden at about 1:15 p.m., and there were, of course, more people there than when I first went on a weekday. The key is, don't go out on weekends to visit these places, people are sick of staying at home and many do not even want to wear facemasks even as the Covid death tolls soar. In California, we are above 15,000 deaths, and climbing by about 80-100 deaths per day. And this is the summer, when the heat is supposed to protect us, because the flu seasons only ravages us in winter, not in summer. Things will get bad once again, they haven't stopped being bad, but many people feel they are sick and tired of quarantine and protective measures, so many are ignoring them. There were small groups that were walking around the garden without their masks, oblivious to the concerns of others.

There are so many paths to explore! I still have not explored everything here, but I am seeing more and more. There is no explosion of colors and flowers such as what I saw at the Sherman Garden, but this garden in Claremont somehow feels more natural, not so cultivated, although of course, it is cultivated. There are no wild splashes of roses, the flower garden in fact was bare, but there are cohesive arrangements of habitats with plants. The desert trees call to me more than the others, and there are sculptures planted in many places, not artful classical nudes like at the Huntington, but abstract art structures.

It got hot again today. It was in the 70s this morning when I was walking, and there was a marine layer. Later on, the layer withdrew (as I knew it would), and we were inching up to the 90s. It was still bearable, although we will hit the lower 100s again by the end of the week. 

There were things I wanted to photograph, and I took plenty of Rollei Infrared film this time. I also took my Kraken 6x12 camera. I shot two rolls, both color, one regular color film and the other slide film. I can't wait to see how they come out. The Kraken is actually a pleasure to use, although of course, I may find myself in dismay since I had noticed a problem with the focus plane. But things might turn out, the ground glass I was using was several millimeters thick, so that might be why I could not verify focus at infinity. Since the film will be several millimeters closer to the lens, it might be in focus. I hope so.

The bombshell, according to a story I saw from the Guardian Newspaper, is that the New York Times managed to obtain copies of Trump's tax returns, and the information is every bit as damning as we knew it would be. He is a fraud, he has paid hardly any taxes, and he has accumulated wealth while claiming exhorbitant losses. He is a fraud, and Trump was supposed to have lashed out already, claiming it was "fake news", as he always does when he is caught in his lies and mendacity. And his base will follow along with him, they are oblivious to all the transgressions, to the everyday racism directed towards blacks, to his demeaning comments about women as groups, not just as political rivals, to his failure to denounce the KKK, to his comment about Wisconsin (or Minnesota) white having good genes in comparison to the black Somalian refugees who have arrived. There love those statements because they always did have a white supremacist agenda, and he is openly expousing it, not just lunatic fringe elements, but the president. The tax returns will make no difference, they will be dismissed like the Covid failure and all the other failures of his administration, all the corruption, all the insanity. 

I am trying to escape from all of this with my self-imposed news blackout, and I will have to try harder. I want to hear nothing. It reminds me of the Bush presidency, but this is much worse. 

While walking around the garden I found these Joshua trees. I thought, why not take a photo in IR? I didn't expect they would reflect it, and they really didn't, but the photo somehow is a study in contrasts, and mirrors how twisted I feel. 

It has its' own austere beauty, even as they are bent over like old men. 

The anxiety is really eating away, as well as the frustration and anger and depression. I need to find some peace, not continue this way. Apparently the first presidential debate is scheduled for this week. I will definitely not watch it. 

I'll post a few more IR photos tomorrow. 

Heritage Park (from mid summer)

 I finally got to developing the negative I took sometime in August of the Windmill structure at Heritage Park in Santa Fe Springs, CA. I remember that I took it with new film, Arista 200, and not with the Catlabs 80 film. Also, I was much more generous with exposure, I think I counted 30 seconds. Three is a nasty flare in one corner, it might have been with my problematic light holder. I am accumulating many unprocessed 8x10 negatives, it is so tedious to process them one at a time that I am delayed. I must have probably 8 more negatives in my envelope at home that need to be developed. I am not really in a hurry, I know they will all be blurry pinhole images. I am not even inclined to continue using that pinhole camera, I want an 8x10 camera with a real lens. Hopefully my developer friend will be able to finish checking his design so that I can buy his printed copy.

I remember when I took this frame. I had to wait for some people to walk through. I think it was in August, but now that I think about it, it might have been a September exposure.

That light flare on the left, I know. Or maybe it was because I bent the film somehow? 

Sherman Botanical Garden in cellphone photos

 Here are a few cellphone photos. What a wonderful constellation of colors! I'll have to return again and again and again. 

Sherman Library in IR (Sept. 25th)

 Here are a few partial scans of the 4x5 Rollei Infrared negatives I processed after my trip to the Sherman Library Botanical Garden on Friday.