How’d THAT happen? 😮

At a certain point in your photographic journey, you expect to see 12 decent images when you pull a roll of 120 out of the developing tank. Plus, you should be able to recall more or less what you did for each frame, especially if you develop the roll immediately after exposing it. So, I was pretty surprised when I saw this image on a roll of Tri-X. First, I don’t remember composing the image or pressing the shutter button. Then, it is apparent that nothing, and I mean nothing, is in sharp focus despite there also being almost no motion blur. Which means I misfocused, plain and simple. There are words for unpleasant bokeh like nervous or jittery. Also, pentagonal. So the image misses on all counts. Yet, in spite of, or maybe because of these qualities, I am a little bit fond of the final result. It’s a minor keeper, to coin a phrase.

Rolleiflex SL66, 80mm lens, Tri-X, Decaffenol.

Blue Highways and Flyover Country

After settling in Austin, my trips back to Los Angeles slowly dwindled in frequency from about twice a year to every now and then. Mostly, I would fly to save time, but on one occasion, I decided to drive in order to see with my own eyes what some folks refer to as 'flyover country'. The journey West by car truly was a great experience, but, unfortunately some jackass Angelino stole my license plates and I had to drive back to Texas with no tags. It was a bummer -- I got stopped by a tag teaming pair of CHP cars near the Arizona border. Seriously, guys?! In retrospect, maybe they were just a bit bored, but the episode unnerved me a little, and I spent the rest of the trip home with one eye always looking in the side view mirror.

Anyway, the only camera I had with me at the time was a Canon AE-1 and a 50 mm f/1.4. A person could do far worse than that. I was going through a phase where I developed my Tri-X in Rodinal plus sodium sulfite. In my one and only photojournalism class, I had been criticized for too much grain in my Rodinal souped negatives, and the addition of sulfite was supposed to ameliorate this issue. It did, but at the expense of yielding pretty thin negatives. That was actually fine for darkroom printing, but I'm not so sure about how well it works for modern day scanning. A bit of a moot point with these negatives, though, isn't it?

Most of the driving time was spent crossing the State of Texas, and I was traveling along what are sometimes called blue highways -- I was avoiding the interstates, in other words. There were plenty of spectacular vistas, and stopping to take a picture didn't really have much of an impact on travel time. I have absolutely no recollection of where I was when I took this photograph, but looking at it now does trigger other memories from the trip.