I don’t know why, I have always enjoyed going out in winter storms and shooting black and white pictures. The winter is winding down so when I saw the snowflakes yesterday I had to get out in it. I have a roll of Ilford HP5 black and white film in my Canon A-1 film camera and I’ve been wanting to do a video about it for some time now. Incidentally, I received an email from Mike’s Camera yesterday with a link to a batch of low resolution previews from my previous film shoot at Eleven Mile Canyon. The film and high resolution CD still need to be sent down from the main lab in Boulder, but at least I can see that the pictures turned out, something you never know with film until the film is developed 🙂 I’ll do a more extensive post on the images when I get the high resolution versions back.
So anyway, I wanted to do a video about shooting black and white film in the snow so yesterday was the day to give it a try. I’m not one of those that likes to put my camera on a tripod in the weather so I decided to just use my phone as a video camera, and I have to say it didn’t do that badly! I also shot a little footage out the window with my Canon 90D and I discovered that if you have the camera set to black and white picture style you are going to get black and white video. I didn’t intend that but in this case with the near monochrome scene anyway,. it worked out ok!
By the time I was ready to shoot my first image the snow was coming down hard, which looks pretty cool in the video… nothing makes me happier than snow falling in the mountains 🙂 My first image was captured in Goldfield where all the old historic Cripple Creek / Victor gold mines are located. I don’t necessarily trust the 50 year old meter on my A-1, especially in such harsh conditions, so I brought along my Sekonic incident meter to make sure my exposures were correct, film is too expensive to waste on bad exposures!
I continued wandering around mine country getting images in the snow for the rest of the morning, except for a few minutes I spent at the Gold Camp Bakery in Victor having a ham and cheese croissant, one of my favorite things in life 🙂
Well anyway, I didn’t get the entire roll of Ilford done yet so the only images I have were the ones I captured with the 90D, it will be interesting to see how they compare to the film when I eventually get it back!
I have always liked the old Ansel Adams prints and the selenium processing that was popular in those days. To me regular monochrome looks too brown and too warm for the snowy scenes I like to capture. It took a lot of fiddling but I eventually came up with a process using the hue and saturation tool to recreate the toned look I like so much. The top image from my Ilford shoot at the canyon is regular monochrome right from the scan at the lab and the others in this post were done using my “selenium” Photoshop process. What do you think? Feel free to leave comments!
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