Well, I'll be a little surprised if I don't have coffee alone Saturday morning. Nothing surprising or novel about that, but I would be interested in sharing some thoughts with other photographers in the area doing traditional film photography. There have been a lot of big changes in the local photography scene since I moved to Albuquerque in 2008.
As far as I know, the only place left in Albuquerque still processing film on site is Picture Perfect at Menaul and Juan Tabo. All of the other one-hour places shut down their Fuji machines several months ago.
There are still a couple retail camera stores in town with collections of old cameras for sale as well as some increasingly limited choices in film-related supplies. I was pleased this morning to be able to buy a couple bottles of TMAX developer at the Camera and Darkroom store on Washington St. The clerk said she is not having any problem getting TMAX and the price was not jacked up.
I didn't find any TMAX at the camera store on Central in the University district last time I went there. The owners and staff there act like they would like the whole film thing to just go away. I think they are fooling themselves to believe that there is any real market for a local retail business with a focus on digital, however.
There is a large and active group of people in Albuquerque doing digital and posting pictures on Flickr in the Albuquerque and DukeCityFix groups. There is some good digital being shown there, but also a lot of garish, horrible HDR stuff. I just can't get myself to put any of my images into that pool.