Week 13, The Trees

I had planned to do a home-brew club meeting and brewery tour this week, but life got in the way.  So I decided to try some different shooting of the trees that surround me.  I took my Olympus OM-2n with a Zuiko 35-105mm/3.5-4.5 lens.  It has a ‘Close focus’ option, which is kind of a macro, but unless I am using it wrong does not work like my dedicated macros.  In order to focus I had to zoom in and out.  The focus ring seemed to make no discernible difference.

I ran two rolls this week, a self-wound roll of Ultrafine Xtreme 400 B&W which I developed in Rodinal 1+100, semi-stand.  Gentle inversions the first ~30 secs, then 3-4 inversions at 20 mins and another 3-4 at 40 mins, 1 hour total, more or less at 20C (probably started at 22 and cooled down some).  I purposely overexposed these B&W shots some and then had to do some level adjustment after scanning.  The other roll is an expired Fuji Super-G 400, expiration date of 11/1999, lab developed and scanned at my local film lab.  With some other rolls of this (I bought a lot of 20), I’ve gotten some funky colors, but this roll looked great.  With the birch shots I was trying to capture that silvery look in B&W, and did on a couple shots, but the color really impressed me.  I like how my featured shot turned out.

Rock-n-roots, 1

Rock-n-roots, 2

White Birch (Betula papyrifera), base

White Birch (Betula papyrifera), closeup

White Birch (Betula papyrifera), color

Diff white birch, detail

Unknown Tree, color

Unknown Tree, B&W, diff side

Beech, kiss the sky

After missing out on getting a shot of a Pileated Woodpecker a week or so ago, I now always bring my camera whenever I walk to the road to check the mail.  I caught my friendly neighbor perched on a broken tree not more than 20 feet (maybe 6-7 meters) away.  And I only had my B&W film loaded.  Well, snap away in any event.  Glad I can see in color, this guy blends right in with B&W (shot is a bit mangled exposure, I had to shoot quick before he flew off).

Red-tailed Hawk.

Red-tailed Hawk, crop

And we finally have most of our snow melted away, just a few remaining spots and piles where the sun can’t quite get to them.

Melt

I’ll be playing with either Portra 800 or CineStill this next week as I have some plans to meet up with some friends from university.  I also finally got a scanner that can handle large format negs, so I might play with that as well.