12 November 2017

On a fall Sunday morning blessed with pretty decent light, a very small group of photographers gathered in the heart of the Doylestown Cultural District and exercised our gear on the grounds surrounding two museums and a library. Yours Truly, Ye Olde Photographer used his Yashica Mat 124G on a monopod. One of the others was shooting a Fuji GW690 "Texas Leica," the other, a Hasselblad. This was all an exercise in medium format film.

Doylestown is the county seat of Bucks County, and fairly old, so the whole town is a target rich environment for photographers and artists. The Mercer Museum was a creation of Henry Chapman Mercer, an archeologist and historian who was interested in preserving many of the tools and crafts of earlier culture. It contains an amazing collection of tools and is an eccentric and historical entity in its own right. Mercer's buildings are unique creations built using concrete, even the window frames! At least for the rather industrial applications, dirt was mounded up and covered with cloth or old carpet. Hand-mixed concrete was poured over the resulting form and the dirt dug out after the concrete cured. While labor-intensive, the technique was a fusion of construction and sculpture permitting rather unusual designs.

The other museum right across the street from the Mercer is the James A. Michener Art Museum which includes quite a bit of sculpture around its grounds. A portion of this museum was an adaptive reuse of a 19th century county prison which opened in 1884.

Ye Olde Photographer shot Kodak 400TX film through a Rollei "Mittel Gelb" (medium yellow) filter. The film was exposed at about ISO 160 (320+filter). YOP did not actually record the individual exposure settings, but most were around a "Sunny 11" setting approximated here in the EXIF data, but not to be taken seriously! YOP developed the films in Kodak HC110 1+63 ("Dilution 'H'"). While he has not yet seen what the others got, YOP is fairly happy with the outing. All 36 shots from the morning are here; while many are not destined for fame and fortune, there are a few interesting possibilities here for exhibition prints.