Winter between the Canal and the Equator

[AmBraCol]

Took the old Canon Rebel T3 out this morning to grab a few B&W shots, have been playing around with monochrome occasionally and find it gives a different feel from color photos. Sepia is also a nifty way of looking at the world around us. Anyway, for those of you facing chillier winter weather than we are, I thought you might like to see the aftermath of the winter storm that came through last night.

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[earlmck]

Sheesh! What am I doing up here in the land of ice and snow?

Well, I am getting some bullets cast and shells loaded while waiting for something approaching "shootin' weather".

Nice pics Paul.

[AmBraCol]

Sheesh! What am I doing up here in the land of ice and snow?

Well, I am getting some bullets cast and shells loaded while waiting for something approaching "shootin' weather".

Nice pics Paul.

And I'm here playing with airguns wishing I could do some casting and loading... such is life. Here's to hoping I get a chance later on in the year!

[COSteve]

It's a 'balmy -8° here today so I'm doubtful I'll be going to our range today.

[Bill in Oregon]

I miss shooting and developing black and white film. Nice images!
Was in the lower 70s here yesterday, but with gusts over 40 and lots of dust from Mexico ...

[Steve in MO]

Great pictures, Paul!

Feels like temps here this morning are -15. Supposed to get up up to 13 today. Between the snow and the cold the chickens don't even want to come out of the coop. Gonna stay inside and make empty cases full again.

[AmBraCol]

Thanks, guys. Bill, unfortunately I never learned to develop my own film. Resources were limited back then and we were doing good to come up with the $$ to develop the occasional film roll in town. But today's cameras are amazing in what they can do. I don't use photoshop, preferring to let the camera tell its tale from its own perspective. This Canon T3 is "obsolete" and "outdated" and so on and so forth, but it's fun to play around with. Yesterday I switched it to monochrome/sepia settings and fitted an old Zenit Helios 44 58mm lens to it and captured a few images. The old lens can yield some amazing background blur under the right circumstances. Yesterday it did OK, just didn't have the conditions to make it "pop" like it can some times. The manual focus can be a bit iffy thanks to less than perfect eye sight, but these turned out OK. Anyway, I get tired of the "green, greener and more green" that's practically constant year 'round here and am in tune with the changing seasons - as slight as the change is 500 miles north of the equator. So my winter photography is a bit different from that further north in the hemisphere!

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[earlmck]

Our "digital darkrooms" are pretty dang neat and provide many a fine image. I had a darkroom in my house all the years I was raising kids which provided a good escape when the "dad thing" got to be too much. I do kinda' miss the old black 'n white process but I do not have the least bit of nostalgia for the color darkroom. Now that was a major PIA. I'm a shameless user of photoshop -- we did many things back in the film darkroom days that you need photoshop or a similar program to do with the digital.

I appreciate the good shootin' Paul.

[6pt-sika]

About this time last year I was in Panama City Panama in the airport connecting between Dullus and Cordoba . Wish I was there now ! Heck of a lot warmer for sure

[Bill in Oregon]

Wow, Earl, processing color! I just processed Kodak Tri X and Plus X with el cheapo FG7 -- quick and dirty for the newspaper halftone camera.

[AmBraCol]

About this time last year I was in Panama City Panama in the airport connecting between Dullus and Cordoba . Wish I was there now ! Heck of a lot warmer for sure

We flew into there for the first time in 2015. It just so happened that that was the weekend that they opened the new locks for folks to go in and look around before flooding them for use. We'd rented a car to get a couple days vacation seeing new places so we got to go and see the locks! That was something I never figured I'd get to do. It was something to see the continuation of the endeavors that reached back 100 + years and see the modern approach to improving the system. The next day we toured the old locks. Anyway, in the past 10 years they've done a lot of improvements to the airport. We tend to fly through there as it keeps us out of Bogotá (direct flight from here!!!) and we can connect to about anywhere we want to go from there.

[AJMD429]

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Due to three generations in a row of people having children in their early forties, my great grandfather was a civil war veteran, and when he was older, he moved to near where we now live, and would come to what is now our place to rent a room 'in the country' when he had time for vacation to get out of Indianapolis. He came out of the city to hunt and fish, and his daughter who often accompanied him liked the place so much she bought it shortly after the turn of the century, to raise her own family, including my dad.

Great grandpa was a hobby photographer, in a big way - back when you used glass plates and the image somehow transferred to the glass. He died long before I was born, but since we live on the property, I remember a small 8x10 ft shed that was his 'darkroom' and had mostly fallen down, but there were a bunch of glass plates and stuff there. By the time I was in college there wasn't anything left, and my aunt had cleared the area of the debris.

However we do still have some of the photographs, taken in the 1880's and 1890's. It is pretty cool to have them. All black and white of course, but some have been preserved amazingly well, and I think I've posted a couple before.

Here's a photo he took of a family get-together in the early 1890's, where we now live...

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How I wish I could converse with those folks - each one looks like they have some stories to tell.

Sadly, I only know who a couple of them even are...

[AmBraCol]

I'm fascinated by the old large format, glass negative cameras. I think it would be a real hoot to give it a try, but that's as far as I've gotten with it.