Week 5 :: Mountain View
Another five images, all from around the Monjuïc, Barcelona, and taken with the Ricoh GR II. Finally, after three months of drought there has been some rain. Real weather with real clouds and wind again.
Ghostlight
Landscape (lakescape?), shot on Lago di Como, Italy. The ghostly halos around the reflections are the rendering from the Zeiss C-Sonnar lens, which was used here with a stack of ND filters to allow it to be used nearly wide open while not burning a hole in the M7’s shutter curtain… Shot on Delta 100, processed in HC110 at box speed.
Black and White Film Workflow with Capture One
I finally figured out a workflow that allows me to scan and then process black-and-white images with reasonable efficiency using Capture One… The main challenge is that C1 fails to handle the 16 bit grayscale TIFF images that the scanner produces, necessitating a conversion to a 16 bit colour TIFF file before the imported images can be edited. The trick is to use ZIP compression, which leaves the file sizes virtually unchanged. As a result, my film processing workflow currently looks something like this:
Stream
Mountain stream in Switzerland. Ilford Delta 100 processed in HC110 dilution H.
The Naked Mountain
The swiss alps, between Silvaplana and St Moritz. In winter this are would usually be full of skiers, but in summer the ski-lifts provide a quick (if expensive) start to a hike in the mountains. Although the mountains are rather barren, if you time the trip well there are usually many photogenic flowers to explore – and maybe the odd naked hiker, if that thing is still allowed near St Moritz. Leica M7 with Zeiss ZM 2/35 and Ilford Delta 100 , processed in HC110 Dilution H (1+63 from concentrate) for 7:30 […]
Taxi
One of the numerous water-taxis, running between Varenna and Belaggio on Lago di Como, Italy. This is a composite of two digital images, processed to give a more film-like look (the lack of dust and fluff should give this away!). Although shot from the same location, the background sky and boat did not in reality appear at the same time. Back to real film and a slower pace tomorrow…
Lake
Fisherman at Varenna, Lago di Como, Italy.
The view to Il Giumello
View towards il Giumello from somewhere above Crandola. The mountain is surprisingly bald, due to grazing by cows and goats. Canon 5DIII with 100mm macro, which doubles as a nice short telephoto for landscape images.
Observatory
I am not entirely sure what this hut is used for, at least when it is not snowing. Alpe Paglio, Italy
Alta Valsassina
Rather too pristine alpine houses, reflecting the rise of tourism in Italy. The luminous colours are again the result of using a polarising filter, which here also helps cut through some of the haze to the distant mountains.
Track
Path, walking up in the mountains around Alta Valsassina, Italy.
Church
Modern church at Pian delle Betulle, Italy. The colours are from using a polarising filter – this was even desaturated in Capture One. Still have not finished the film scanning…
Endings
Iron cross and lake, commemorating those that died in the second world war. Something that European politicians today seem to have forgotten.
Hiking in Zion National Park
A set of photographs taken from a day’s hiking in Zion National Park, Utah. The park is centred around another wonderful water eroded red sandstone valley, cut through the same sedimentary depositions that resulted in both the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon. Ascending from the bottom to the top of these sites you can see more than 200 million years of fascinating geological history (pdf) – as well as the spectacular views. The photograph below shows the trails we followed. We originally intended only to walk to Hidden Canyon, but the route was much easier than expected and so we […]
Sea of Ice
A set of shots taken from flight TK79 on its northern route between Istanbul and San Francisco. These photographs were chosen to make a nice contrast with the previous post about the Grand Canyon. These shots were taken (somewhat obviously) from the plane window while half blinded by the incredible light reflected by this white landscape. These are of northern Canada – just slightly north of the Baffin Bay – on a sunny, and probably warmish day of spring, with the snow and ice pack starting to melt. The glaciers pouring out […]
Grand Canyon
A short set of slightly abstract images taken from a flight over the Grand Canyon. The aim was to produce images similar to the reliefs seen in an old geography text book. Photographing through a moving airplane window was quite challenging. With a rather tight travel schedule, we chose a late-afternoon flight to try to get some shadow and contrast in the photographs, shooting with a fast shutter speed to compensate for the rather bumpy flight and using careful post processing in Lightroom to handle the atmospheric haze. Framing was challenging, to […]
Transient Eye 