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Photographer: Jean-Michel Lefebvre ©
Date: 22
june 1972
Size: 135
B&W negatives
Subject: Cazaux
Armament & Weaponnery Center
Place:
Cazaux
Country: France
Caption:
Canberra B.6 at Cazaux Base used for armament as so as missile
active parts experiments and tests. Left, buildings devoted to
management of the Firing Range activities which are continuous
all over the year.
EDITORIAL
They are no
extraordinary visible buildings and infrastructures at Cazaux BA
120 Air Base though, here, is installed an annex of the Mont-de-Marsan
CEAM (Flight Experimentation Military Center) to evaluate and
test on the field the latest armaments and also evaluate the
firing abilities of new types of aircraft having to equip French
Armée de l'Air. At another place on the base is housed the 8th
Fighter Wing with Dassault Mystère IV As ( now Dassault-Dornier
Alpha-jets), a conversion wing which is an obliged step for all
freshly breveted fighter pilot where, before integration to
combat unit, he learns all about his future job: operational
sorties, ground attack and air-air combat techniques with,
naturally, intensive practice on the firing range surrounding the
Cazaux runway where all other French and foreign units come to
achieve firing campaigns.
Otherly, each time I went to Cazaux I saw quite interesting
aircraft and armaments as so as great "sounds and light
" shows when aircraft demonstrated new armaments from
cannons to laser guided or anti-runway drag-chuted bombs, passing
by demonstration of new rocket launchers or massive incendiary
bombing etc.
I am sorry, sharpness of negatives is generally quite good if not perfect but film scanning brings its lot of troubles about final result. I own a Minolta Scan Dimage, a pro material able to scan, thanks to three different holders and various masks all transparent materials from 10x15mm to 6x9cm. It's necessary to let the whole 6 negs completely inside the scanner during several minutes before numerise them. Otherly, normal operations providing immediate high quality pre-scan pictures does that, passing from ambiant temperature to scanner inside temperature, neg ( or slide ) surface is rounding under internal warmth while scanner is doing its focusing task and all will be desesperatly bad...Even with low quality pre-scans, after a five minutes wait and then numerisation including focusing task, things are far from perfection beside results with an enlarger for argentic paper. I repeat this: get an argentic 18x24 cm or 24x30cm picture from your neg and then do a flat scan. So, you may produce very high quality hudge pictures. What I wrote is about 135 neg strips or lot of four slides. For other film sizes, third holder has two Newton glasses and here problem is different: dust has a fantastic love for the deep or light blue of skies!!!
JMJ Lefebvre
