Thursday, December 28, 2017

C-O-L-D Christmas

Christmas 2017 has come and gone.  I was hoping that there would be an opportunity to get out and do some things outdoors over the break.  My shop is closed over the Christmas break and it would have been nice to get outside.  Unfortunately the weather has not co-operated.  Since Christmas Day the day time high temperature has only struggled up to about -20C.  In the next day or so that high is only forecast to get to -28C.  The night time low temperatures are in the mid minus 30's and once the wind chill effect is factored in it feels like about -45C.
In an attempt to warm up a little I was sorting through some scans of images from last summer.  This shot was taken at the end of July, in an abandoned Ranch House down in the Alberta badlands.  On that day the temperature was nearly +40C.  I get hot just thinking about it.  These old ranch buildings were supposed to be infested with rattlesnakes but the heat was so intense that we didn't see any.  It was a little cooler inside the old log building.  I shot this image on Efke PL25 4x5 sheet film with my Ebony view camera and a wide angle Nikkor 65mm lens.  The light was so low inside that I had difficulty focusing the camera.  I didn't notice that the sharpness dropped off a little on the underside of the log roof.  I employed a forward tilt on the camera to hold the foreground box in focus, and didn't realize what it did to the ceiling.  I stopped the lens down to F20.0, which required an exposure of 2 minutes with this slow, fine-grained film.  The film was developed for normal contrast in Rodinal developer, diluted 1:50, for 7:00 minutes at 24C.


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