The Yellow Cow and Other Delights

Some years ago I took a trip to northern New Mexico; to be precise it was in October of 1974. It was a great trip with many interesting and beautiful sights to see and photograph. On one of the days I drove from Santa Fe to Taos on back roads. It is a distance of roughly 60 miles but it took all day. It seemed like I stopped about every 30 seconds to photograph something.

When I got back and had the film processed I showed some of the photos to some friends who owned a shop of some kind or other. I can't remember for sure now but I think it was a beauty shop. She said that she would be glad to display some prints for sale in her shop if I would like to make the prints and mark the sale prices on them. It sounded like a fun thing to do. I didn't think I was going to make much but that was okay. It gave her shop some decoration and I might make enough money to buy another roll of film or two.

I made a selection of about six photos and had the photo lab make 8x10 prints. Like all good cowboys I had a bunch of old barn boards laying around. I mounted the prints on mounting board and then mounted the result on pieces of old barn board. The subject matter of the photos lent them to that sort of mounting and display.

I can't be very precise about the places where the photographs were taken because of two problems: no GPS in those days and I was on a lot of unpaved back roads with few or no signs.

The photo below was what appears to be a log flume built over a wash. It was somewhere in the back country north of Cordova, New Mexico. 

The big tree decorated in it's autumn finery is just north of Santa Fe.

The autumn lane shown below is south of Chimayo, New Mexico. 

The old wagon shown below was at Rancho Chimayo where there was also a great restaurant named Rancho de Chimayao Restaurant.

Below is a yellow cow on the side of a dirt road somewhere on my meanderings. Not sure where, probably somewhere around Truchas, New Mexico.

The last photo shows ovens at Taos Pueblo.

Which of the photos do you like best?

A note about the photos: These were all taken with a Mamiya Sekor 1000DTL SLR on 35mm Kodachrome film. They were scanned on either a Minolta Dimage 5400 film scanner or a Plustek Opticfilm 8200i film scanner. Unfortunately my Minolta scanner died in the middle of this project and Minolta quit making them several years ago. I could not find one available anywhere on the internet so I bought a new Plustek. It's a good scanner but it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks. Or how to use new scanners.