As I sat in my chair with the doggies and drank my morning coffee, I checked the weather and decided to go out and shoot a video on a subject I’ve been kicking around lately. And that subject is shooting monochrome pictures of the old gold mine head frames with a mirrorless digital camera.
I should have been suspicious that the day was going to turn ugly when I saw the bank of ice cold fog rolling up the valley from the south. As I stood there in the cold capturing this image, snowflakes that weren’t supposed to arrive until late afternoon began lazily drifting down from the sky.
By the time I got to the first head frame, the fog had reached Victor and flakes were falling in earnest. As I prepared to shoot some video, I discovered that the battery on my selfie stick had died. Undaunted, I turned on my phone video manually and turned to my camera to set the picture styles to monochrome. As the cold penetrated my bones and I began to shiver, I couldn’t remember where the setting was in the menu system. Eventually I located it and made the change, but by then my teeth were chattering and I quickly abandoned the idea of shooting a video.
The gist of the video was going to be that you can set your picture styles to monochrome, and your compositions will appear in black and white through the viewfinder and on your playback LCD. If you are really clever and have your camera set to record both raw and .jpg captures of each shot, you can have both monochrome and color available for each capture. Raw images of course always retain all the information that was recorded with the capture. Watch my Youtube channel for the video, I still plan to shoot it!
By this time the fog had reached Goldfield, and the snow was beginning to accumulate. I hadn’t planned on the path being snow covered, and my toes quickly turned to into ice cubes in my summer hikers. I noticed I was walking like Frankenstein, and couldn’t feel my legs. My entire body was shaking uncontrollably and the word that finally registered in my mind was abort, abort! I turned around and quickly made my way back to the jeep, while snapping a couple of images along the way.
Clearly I had failed to plan for the weather and it was not my day. The morning wasn’t a total loss though, I thoroughly enjoyed a crackling fire in the wood burner with hot coffee and a blueberry crumble at the Gold Camp Bakery afterwards 🙂
Perhaps if I had reviewed my own book Storm Warning, I would have been reminded to prepare for the oncoming weather instead of just wandering out the door like it was a beautiful spring morning!
Oddly, the weather had not yet reached the south face of Pikes Peak, and I was able to capture this beautiful color image of the fresh snow from earlier in the week!
Steven W. Krull is a renowned photographer and author who has been photographing and writing of the beauty and wildlife of the Colorado Rocky Mountains for over two decades. Please visit his website at S.W. Krull Imaging to view his work, including thousands of prints for sale, stock images for commercial use, and his library of published books.
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Colorado Photographer / Author / Wildlife Advocate | Steven W. Krull 