It's been a while

It's hard to believe that my last post was almost a year ago.  I just acquired a complete darkroom recently so I should have some more materiel soon.  I have shot a few rolls of film in the last couple of weeks, but there's nothing of much interest.  I'm waiting some inspiration.

A hike in the woods

A few days after Christmas, Sarah, the kids, and I went with our friend Mike VanHoeke and his family to visit some American missionaries.  Tim and Donna Barger have been here for (I believe) 19 years and live with their daughter, Kokoroel, in the hills northwest of Yokota.  Mike arrived earlier in the morning to help the Barger's remove a nest of hibernating hornets.  We missed this, but got there in time to sit down to a delicious lunch of Minestrone soup, a Greek salad that we brought, and some of Kumiko Van Hoeke's apple pie.  Afterward, we all put on our hiking shoes and ventured up to a couple of falls at the top of the hill overlooking the Barger's home.  The walk to the first falls was steep but not too difficult.  Mike stepped on what he thought was solid ground, only to have his leg fall through a hole up to his knee, but he was fine.  After the first falls were reached, Tim and I walked up a much more treacherous path to the second falls.  The following photos are from the walk up to the trail and from the second falls.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

Caffenol

I tried my hand at homebrew developers last night with some Caffenol and Tri-X. I got the recipe from digitaltruth.com but it is floating around all over the net. It's pretty easy to make, but very smelly, much worse than other photo chemicals. It also took a very long time to develop, 35 minutes in the tank instead of the usual 6-8 it takes with other developers. All-in-all it took about 1 hour from setup to tear-down. The coffee stained the film brown, but when scanned in monochrome (or printed in a darkroom) the stain doesn't matter. In fact I've read the stain acts as a contrast filter on the enlarger.  Anyway, enough about that, here are two of the pics, scanned as a color positive to show the stain and as a b&w negative to show the actual photo.  These were taken on a 1960s vintage Voigtlander Bessa I folder.

 

The zone focus attributes to the fuzzyness of  Keddy's head.  This camera is great for sunny days, though.

2009 Yokota Airbase Friendship Festival

   The Yokota AB Friendship Festival (YAFF), a two-day event that occurs every August, was established to bolster the ties between the Americans on base and the local Japanese community. This years YAFF saw the arrival of over 170,000 Japanese locals to Yokota. In addition to the games, food, and music acts, many of the visitors are drawn to the static and aerial aircraft displays.

  The Japanese are known for their love of cameras, a stereotype that was not contradicted at the YAFF. Photographers arrived with the latest in digital imaging technology, massive telephoto lenses, tripods, stepladders, and any other photographic accessory one may think of. They also brought radio scanners to listen in on Air Traffic Control when the aerial displays were going on. These photographers are the subject of my maiden voyage into the blogosphere, enjoy.