The photographic highlights of my summer were Iceland and the Lofoten Islands, but the best hiking – by far – was in Norway’s Rago National Park. There are really only a couple of trails suitable for day hikes in the park, but you can combine them to make a superb 15 mile loop whose highlight is the Litlverivassfossen waterfall. On an overcast day that was good for hiking but not very dramatic photographically my brother had some success shooting infrared images. I stuck almost exclusively to documenting the hike with video.
Staying out of the deep end
One of the side effects of having a fairly visible web presence is that people sometimes assume that your Google ranking is some sort of proxy for expertise. For myself, I rather enjoy offering up my 10 cents when people email me asking for advice on hikes I’ve done or wilderness areas I’ve visited. I drew the line, however, when a journalist wanted to interview me about how to see bears safely in Alaska. Photographing bears in Alaska has been one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had, but as a theoretical astrophysicist hailing from the “wilds” of Kent in the UK I’m singularly ill qualified to offer advice about potentially dangerous megafauna. Like most hikers and photographers, I suspect, I consider myself to be a cautious and safety-oriented lover of wilderness. But if we’re honest it’s hard to prove that – even to ourselves – objectively. I’ve crossed glacial creeks in the Yukon without incident, but would I have known to turn back if it had been unsafe to cross? I’ve followed advice to get an early start in Colorado to avoid thunderstorms, but is my awareness of dangerous weather sufficiently perceptive? How risky, really, is hiking?
I was reminded of these thoughts reading a great blog post by one of the rangers in Wrangell-St Elias national park. Wrangell-St Elias – in Alaska – is one of the true wildernesses of North America, and a place I’ve long wanted to visit. The ranger’s story is of a visitor who, through inexperience or poor judgement, abandoned his pack on the notorious scree slope that has to be traversed on the park’s most famous backpacking route, the Goat Trail. Ranger Olson’s conclusion, “Anytime a hiker has to make a decision between their life and their backpack it’s fair to say they
Backing up to the cloud
Sunset, Cloud Peak wilderness
I made the switch to digital with a Canon 20D in time for summer 2005, and in the decade since I’ve accumulated 1.4TB of images. That’s not a lot compared to many photographers, but keeping any data safe for long periods is a challenge that requires a bit of thought. Over the last ten years I’ve suffered two disk failures (one of an internal disk, one external), and discovered from painful experience (fortunately not with my drives) that even quite sophisticated data recovery services can fail.
My current backup strategy is simple. The images live on a single 2TB external drive, which is backed up (along with some other stuff) to a second 3TB drive. Every month I copy the data to a third drive, which ordinarily sits in a drawer in my office. This guards against what are probably the most likely mishaps – a failure of a single drive (inevitable), a software bug that renders all connected drives unreadable (shouldn’t happen, but an OS-X update felled a bunch of my brother’s drives), and physical loss or destruction of the computer. It’s not completely secure, of course, but if an asteroid wipes out both my apartment and my office I imagine matters other than photographic will occupy my attention.
Although this all works fine, the off-site backup is a bit cumbersome, and to be honest my resolution to do it “every month” is most often honored in the breach. With that in mind I’ve started experimenting with backing up to the Amazon Cloud Drive, which (for now at least) offers unlimited photo storage for Amazon Prime subscribers. I’m finding it works pretty well. The system recognizes Canon .CR2 raw files, and I can upload 20-30GB chunks of data overnight without much problem. The main criticism I hear – that it’s a bare bones service that doesn’t offer much in the way of file management – is a plus for me
Trail Ridge road
Shooting with the Fuji GW690ii in 2015
Earlier this summer I bought a second-hand Fuji GW690ii, a 6x9cm medium format rangefinder with a fixed 90mm lens (equivalent to about 35mm full frame). It takes film. Mention this to most people in 2015 and the immediate question is why you would want such a thing. In my case it was a mixture of curiosity (could I take film images that I actually preferred to digital ones?) and long suppressed equipment envy (I would have loved to have medium or large format equipment in the 90s, but back then it was way beyond my budget). But mostly I thought it would be a fun diversion.
Over the course of the summer I’ve shot just enough on the Fuji (two rolls, that’s 16 exposures, total!) to form some first impressions…
The tale of the tape
Out of the box the first impression is that this is a large camera. Large enough to amaze, amuse or horrify your friends, depending on their inclination. It’s not, however, tremendously heavy. It tips the scales at about 1.5kg (a little over 3 pounds), which is actually lighter than my full-frame DSLR (a Canon 5D3) with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. I’ve mostly used a tripod, but hand held shooting is perfectly feasible. Discrete shooting, less so.
The shooting experience
Coming from an SLR / DSLR background, the main challenge to using the Fuji is mastering the rangefinder focusing system. The optical finder has a small bright spot at its center, which shows horizontally displaced double images that snap together when focus is achieved. For those with long memories, it’s quite like the split-screen focusing that used to be a staple of film SLRs. For subjects that are basically stationary, and which have prominent vertical lines, it works extremely well, and very little practice is needed to focus quickly. Moving subjects – a field of flowers waving in the breeze for example – are doable but a good deal more challenging for a beginner.
Focusing apart, the rest of the camera works very much like an oversized SLR, though as there’s a leaf shutter both the aperture and the shutter speed are set via rings on the lens. You don’t have to worry about running out of battery as there is no battery – the operation is fully mechanical and there isn’t even a light meter! I bought a hand held light meter – which does wonders for one’s professional image in the field – though I’ve mostly been using the Fuji side by side with other cameras that can be used as glorified light meters. Minor hassles with metering apart, I’ve found it a very easy camera to get to grips with.
The workflow
Having some fun with film need not imply all out luddism. I don’t have any inclination to process my own film (even though for B&W it’s not that hard), or to print it optically. Scanning and then processing / printing in the same way as my digital images was therefore the plan. I choose a 6x9cm camera, in part, because the large negative size allows for decent scans from an inexpensive flatbed scanner. For the first few rolls, however, I got low resolution scans made at the time of processing, and had the best looking image drum scanned at high resolution.
A first comparison with digital
You certainly don’t buy a film camera in 2015 with the idea of getting a sharper or objectively “better” image than high-end digital equipment. But it’s hard to resist seeing if there are any obvious differences in the look. I took both the Fuji and my normal camera (a Canon 5D3 with 24-70mm lens) to Iceland and shot a few roughly side-by-side frames. Here’s the spectacular Gullfoss waterfall, in harsh direct sunlight in the early afternoon. Conditions for sightseeing rather than making good photos.
Both images have been processed to taste in Lightroom (darkening the sky in the Canon frame by pulling out the blue in the B&W conversion). You can’t say anything about sharpness from this comparison – it’s a low resolution scan and the jpegs are smaller still – but to my eye the overall look of the images is pretty similar. The only real difference comes from using a slower shutter speed on the Fuji frame (ISO 50 film is slow, and I used a red filter with a 3 stop filter factor on top).
Detail rendering
The black sand beach at the outlet of the J
Summer on the Lofoten islands
For our summer trip my brother and I headed to just above the Arctic Circle in Norway. We spent one day hiking in Rago National Park (more about that some other time) but our main base was the Lofoten islands, which I’ve wanted to visit for some time. Visiting in late July the days of 24 hour sunlight were over, but only just… the sun set after midnight and rose again around 2am! With photography in mind we settled into a routine of sleeping in late, hiking in the late afternoon and evening, and staying up for the sunset / night (which was never dark enough to really need lights) / sunrise.
The hiking on the islands was good but not exceptional; we found the condition of the trails to be poor and didn’t really find any hiking destinations that were more interesting than spots near the road. The photographic potential, on the other hand, is first class. It’s a truism that photographic locations live or die on the quality of the light, but I felt that to be particularly true on the Lofotens. We had a couple of overcast or rainy days when making any kind of image was hard, and a couple of mostly sunny days with great sunsets and sunrises that made for nice conventionally pretty landscapes. You probably need some interesting or unusual weather if you want a unique image, and if I went back I’d probably try my luck with late winter.
For a different take, my brother shot a gallery largely in infra-red, which worked quite well on the sunny days when the light for color images was nothing special. We planned the trip with the aid of the 68 North website, an excellent resource if you’re visiting the Lofotens with photographic goals.
Iceland
A long weekend in southern and south-eastern Iceland, starting near Reykjavik with Gullfoss and Geysir and then heading along the ring road to Vatnajokull national park. The glaciers and vast stretches of old lava flows are quite incredible.
Looked like it might be an interesting sunset tonight so headed up Flagstaff Road to the Lost Gulch Overlook, from where there’s a good view of the Indian Peaks. I shot with the 70-200mm which is about right unless you want to include Boulder Canyon in the foreground. Big crowd there tonight… From near the top of the 1st / 2nd Flatiron trail from Chautauqua
Posted in Locations, Uncategorized
Lost Gulch Overlook
Duomo di Milano
Second Flatiron, Boulder