Spirit Tree

Last October, myself and three other members of the Monochrome Guild headed out on our annual fall trip.  Normally we have referred to it as the Fall Photo Weekend, but now that most of the Guild, and in particular the ones taking part this year, are retired, the weekend part didn't matter.

Normally we have visited Jasper National Park but this past fall, with the wildfires still in the recent past, many of the hotels and businesses had not yet reopened to the public.  So we elected to head down to the badlands of southern Alberta instead.

This is a photograph of a once majestic Plains Cottonwood tree.  It is said to be over 300 years old and would have been a sapling when the first white explorers visited the area.  Some of the branches were still alive at this late point in the fall when I visited, but the tree is obviously not doing well.  I shot this on a sheet of Ilford HP5 film, rated at 320 iso.  I used my Ebony view camera and a wide Nikkor 75mm lens.  A #25 Red filter added some contrast and created a little separation between sky and clouds. Development was in 510 Pyro, for 7:25 minutes, at 24C.  The exposure was 1/8 second at F22.0.  I shot this on October 17th 2024, at about 4:00 in the afternoon.  

The image kind of reminds me of the famous painting, "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.  He created that work in 1893, and the tree would have been well advanced at that time.

This is another shot of the same tree, taken over 25 years earlier.  This image was included in the traveling gallery exhibition called "Procession West" that my friend Rob Michiel and I put together around 2013.  That show, with this print included, toured around various galleries throughout Western Canada.  I was much younger and somewhat fitter back in those days, and carried around a much heavier camera than I use now, in my old age.  Originally I worked with a heavy Sinar F1 monorail camera which I packed around in a protective plastic case mounted onto a metal back pack frame.  That outfit, together with tripod, weighed well over 60 Lbs.  These days, my camera outfit, using the lighter and more compact Ebony view cameras, weighs in at about half that weight.  I did use the same Nikkor SW 75mm lens for both shots.

This older image was taken on a sheet of the long discontinued Agfapan APX-100 sheet film rated at 50 iso.  I developed it in Rodinal 1:50, for 14:00 minutes at 20C.  This 4" x 5" sheet was exposed on August 27th 1997, at about 7:30 in the morning.  A #12 Yellow filter bumped contrast a little but to a lesser extent than the red filter I selected a quarter century later.  The exposure for this one was 1/2 second at F22.0.