Finally completed a project I’ve been wanting to do for some time now… Shooting Eleven Mile Canyon on a frosty winter morning with black and white film in my old Canon AE-1. I almost waited too late though, we’ve had a warm stretch and a lot of the ice on the Platte River has melted along with most of the snow along the banks.
But, we finally got a good snow and some zero degree weather yesterday and I decided now or never, at least for this season. So I loaded up a roll of Ilford ISO 400 film and ventured out to the canyon. 100 speed film would have been the better choice but I don’t happen to have any of that. I packed up the camera plus my old Canon 70D to shoot some video with and of course my 90D with the 100-400 and the 1.4x tele in case I spotted any eagles. I also brought along my old Sekonic incident meter so that I could use the old camera on manual without having to worry about the bright snow messing up my exposures.
It occurred to me to check the old incident meter against my 70D to see if they agree, so I set the digital camera to the same values as the meter called for and took a couple of test shots. As it turns out the old meter and the 70D agree exactly on the parameters for exposure so I realized I could actually get some duplicate shots with the 70D while at the same time using it as a meter for the film camera. This of course gave me another idea for a blog post, a side by side comparison between film and digital images. When I got back home to the computer I converted some of the images from digital to black and white so when I get the film and prints back I will compare them in another post.
I was done with all the pictures and video about the time it started to warm up and melt the snow and felt that it had been a pretty good day. I decided to go on over to Woodland Park before it started snowing again and I was greeted by quite a show on Pikes Peak as the next storm was making it’s way on the scene. I had a few exposures left on my roll of 36 so I added a few cool black and white shots of the peak to my day as well.
We have another winter storm rolling in tomorrow night so perhaps I’ll use up the film in the snow on Thursday morning. I’ve also been wanting to try black and white film out on the old gold mining ruins on a snowy day so maybe I can kill two birds with one stone by shooting the Cripple Creek / Victor mining district in monochrome.
Speaking of birds.. When the sun finally came out and warmed the river banks a small flock of mountain chickadees came to visit. I tried my best to photograph them while they were happily singing and bouncing around… looks like I may have gotten one good picture anyway 🙂
I’m still working on the video for this post, as it turns out after upgrading to Windows 11 and installing a new video card my old video creating software no longer functions. I’m already paying $30 a month for my Adobe products, the Photoshop package plus inDesign, so for just $20 more I can have the entire suite of publishing products including Premiere Pro and After Effects. Unfortunately those aren’t simple to learn packages so the video is being delayed a bit while I get up to speed.
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