Light at the End of the Tunnel

One more weekend without even pulling out a camera: a photographic dry well. I did get my kite up at Mahukona, but the offshore wind was so shifty, it wasn't worth risking total loss of my gear. So the kite came right back down, the KAP bag went right back in my Jeep, and we went right on our merry way.

Earlier that day I stopped at a place I've heard described as "Whistling Canyon". In reality it's a gulch, eroded out by water flowing off of Kohala. But the shape is closer to a box canyon, so the naming makes sense. The canyon faces 90 degrees to the Tradewinds, and it really does whistle. The disconcerting part was the edge, which is completely vertical. I've grown used to tall cliffs, but usually they have some sort of slope on them, often with trees. If you fall it'll hurt, and it'll hurt bad, but there's at least a 1% chance of survival. At Whistling Canyon, the cliff face is vertical rock. There's nothing to stop you for several hundred feet. I was more cautious than usual. It was a great view, but in the end I couldn't work out any good angles, but I plan to go back when the water's flowing to see if there's a way to get in front of the waterfall. That would be pretty.

Toward the end of the weekend I remembered I had four sheets of TMX from a previous shoot. DOH! I didn't get around to developing them, but I hope to get those done tonight. In the meanwhile I found some stuff in town to photograph, so I'm planning to spend my lunch hour walking around with my 4x5 and my last sheets of TMX. With any luck I'll have at least six sheets to develop tonight, and some empty film holders to load up.

Next week I'll be spending a fair bit of time on the other side of the island, doing photography among other things. Since the 4x5 KAP camera clearly needed something faster than TMX which is an ISO 100 film, I ordered a box of improved TMY. It's an ISO 400 film with better grain structure than the older TMY formula, and only slightly less sharpness than TMX. Perfect for aerial 4x5, and it can't hurt on the ground, either. Since I can't image the grain on my TMX negatives with the scanner I'm using, I'm not taking much of a hit in order to get two stops improvement in speed.

In order to make the aerial 4x5 work I also need to rebuild the shutter on my 150mm lens. I've got some good instructions on how to do this, but it'll be my first time. All the symptoms point toward a dirty clockwork mechanism. This makes sense considering that shutter had its flash sync socket ripped out at some point in the past, so dust and other contaminants can get inside. I'll be fixing the hole in the side of the shutter as part of the repair, so hopefully this won't happen again.

Lots to prepare before I can go, but I'm looking forward to the trip. There hasn't been this much photographic possibility in front of me in ages. It's the light at the end of the tunnel.

Tom