Longs Peak Journal: July 2016

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Fog at Swan Lake in IR

The middle of June this year I attended a B&W Photography/Printing workshop hosted at the Photographer’s Formulary. While the workshop focused on film, I also shot some digital IR with my converted Nikon 1.

We had gotten up just after sunrise to shoot at a nearby location called Swan Lake. After winding through a maze of barely one lane roads, we arrived at the lake, covered in mist. It was a magical morning. I make a number of photographs with film and as the last of the fog was listing, decided to grab my digital IR camera to see how that would look. Here's the result.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Holland Lake

Spent a week in Montana at a B&W Photography/Printing workshop led by Nathan McCreery, and hosted at the Photographer’s Formulary. We focused on shooting and printing B&W film. The Photographer’s Formulary has a full darkroom at their facility with professional grade printers. Learned a new way to shoot using the zone system and a spotmeter, developed many rolls and sheets of film.

The biggest lesson learned here is that making a good negative to print is much harder than making a negative that scans well. I’d been pretty happy with the results from scaning my negatives the last couple of years. It was only when I tried to print some of these that I realized that they weren’t actually exposed as well as I thought. This experience has gotten me to realize that I need to be more careful with my exposures and need to make physical prints more often.

This image was made at Holland Lake near sunset.

The photograph was made with my B&J 4×5 press camera, 150 mm lens, Ilford Delta Pro 100 film, developed in Ilford DD-X developer and scanned on an Epson V700 flatbed scanner.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Leggat Mountain

I think this is Leggat Mountain, on the Mill Creek road, outside of Sheridan Montana. I was experimenting with HDR, and got less than satisfactory results. Notice the artifacts around the transition between the mountains and the sky.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

World's Largest Larch Tree

Larch Tree grow big in the water-abundant Seeley-Swan valleys, but the granddaddy of them all is a 1,000-year-old western larch, known locally as Gus. A gentle, mile-long nature trail loops through the Girard Grove near the western shore of Seeley Lake.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Forest within a forest

I'm on week 24 of my 52 rolls project. So that puts me about a month behind on posts.

In week 24 I posted a photograph I made this June in Montana while attending a B&W Photography/Printing workshop hosted at the Photographer’s Formulary. The workshop was led by a New Mexican landscape photographer by the name of Nathan McCreery and focused on film shooting technique and printing negatives.

This image came about after the light at the primary location had gotten too strong. We had gotten up just after sunrise to shoot a nearby location called Swan Lake. Once the light on the lake had gotten too harsh, I headed with my camera down a disused trail, and happened on this scene of a pair of trees growing out of a trunk. Scenes like this always make me contemplate the tenacity of life. So I made this image.

T he photograph was made with my B&J 4×5 press camera, 150 mm lens, Ilford Delta Pro 100 film, developed in PMK PYRO developer and scanned on an Epson V700 flatbed scanner.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Robber’s Roost

Listed in the National Register, this two-story log building dates to 1863, constructed by Pete Daly as a road house for travelers to the Virginia City mines. Tradition has it that it also became a hang-out for road agents who stole from travelers, thus the name.

IR photo using converted nikon V1 digital camera.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Big Sky

I always thought the saying about Montana having big skies was silly, that was before our visit. They're big sky with great clouds to accent them. unlike must of the rest of the south west that has big horizons, but their just blue expanses.