More from the CBG

 Sounds like a commercial tagline for a television program, but it's not, these are more 8x10 pinhole images taken on Sunday, Dece. 6th, 2020 at the California Botanic Garden. I was using Catlabs 80 film, and shutter speeds of between 40 and 50 seconds. I developed them today using my 20th Century Camera reel and regular Arista developer. I gave them 9 minutes of developer, two minutes of a water wash and three minutes of fix. They dried quickly, in less than an hour. I scanned them in office mode on my Epson V600 which is not optimized for 8x10 scans. The setting was 1200 dpi, the highest I can get for office documents, and I had to lay some white printing paper on top of them so that the surface of the scanner lid is not copied, since negatives are semi-transparent. This white paper may give the images a grit they wouldn't have on a properly-sourced scanner, but until I can "fork up" the thousand-plus dollars for a scanner able to scan 8x10s, this will have to do. 

This is the first example.

This is a statue that is a normal (integral) part of this botanic garden. The only thing I am looking at is the light leak. This was taken with the Fidelity Elite holder I bought a few weeks ago from Ebay. It was listed as "As-New, only used a few times". I wonder if I did something, or if the tightener on back was not tight enough. I don't think it is the holder, it looks and feels new, as advertised. What gets me each time I see these pinhole images is how wide the frame of reference is for these photos. It looks like I was standing 20 feet back when, in reality, I was about 6 feet away.

This is the second.

Beautiful, beautiful tree out in the wildlands (the desert habitats) of the garden. I love the way it came out, but the vignetting is severe and the center is always overexposed with these negatives. 

What comes tomorrow? A visit from our little friend, unfortunately. I think we have Santa Ana winds in the forecast, and I have heard some blasts of air outside as I write this at 10:58 p.m. The awful thing is, we are in December and we still have fires. There is a blaze out in Santa Paula, CA. I think with global climate change, the Southwest will have a fire season that extends all year long, not just for summer and fall. We will lose water sources and many plants will die out because the habitat will change and they will not be able to hang on here. It is something that is becoming very tangible, despite the defiant and ignorant rantings of people like Trump. I fear for what we will see here in this part of the country in thirty or less years. Maybe we will all be force to move to Canada. Maybe this will become a dystopian Mad Max arena. At least I am trying to capture what remains for now, and trying to survive this pandemic.