Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Eddy on Upper Gog Creek

I just returned from four days in the badlands of southern Alberta, hence the delay in updating my blog.  More information and images from that trip to follow in future blog posts.  For now, here is another image from the September trip to Mt. Assiniboine.  This image was taken on September 16th about 11:00 AM.  This is upper Gog Creek, near treeline, in Wonder Pass.  This particular spot is only a few hundred yards from the continental divide and the Alberta - British Columbia border.  My hand held GPS unit indicated that the elevation was 7660 feet above sea level.
I have always been captivated by the way a still photograph can convey time.  I have been photographing moving water for years.  I have always been on the lookout for swirling eddies, and made numerous attempts to photograph them.  This one was particularly successful, in my opinion.  A rapid just out of view to camera right was creating a lot of bubbles in the creek.  As the water spilled down into the upper reaches of the canyon, many of these bubbles were captured in this swirling eddy.  Rather than compose in tight on it, I chose to include the eddy as just a portion of the overall view.  I think it worked out reasonably well.  I put a dark red filter [#25] on my 110mm Schneider Super Symmar XL lens to both add contrast, and increase the exposure time.  This was coupled with a small aperture of F36.0 and yielded a shutter speed of about 4 seconds.  The image was taken on a ReadyLoad packet of Kodak T-Max 100 film, exposed at 80 iso.  This is one of my favorite images from the trip and I expect I will attempt a fine print in the darkroom this winter.  I have another version of this image shot on Fuji Acros 100 with a slightly longer exposure.  I will wait until I process that film, and compare the two, before deciding on which to print.


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