Willow Creek

I just recently did a little work on this scan.  This is Willow Creek, not far up the road from our place in East Coulee.  I shot this last October, when my friend Rob and I were exploring in the badlands for a few days.  We had originally planned to go to southeastern Alberta, but it rained too much and we called that off and stayed around the Drumheller area.  

I shot this on Efke PL25M 4" x 5" sheet film with my Ebony SV45TE camera and a Schneider Super Symmar XL 80mm lens.  In some ways the image was a success, and in other ways it failed.  The creek was flowing with a trickle of water, a result of the recent heavy rains.  That water was so muddy and brown that it looked more like "liquid dirt".  There were some rocks in the creekbed just upstream from this spot and the current spilling over and around them was generating a lot of bubbles.  I hoped that a long exposure would render those bubbles as streaks.  I'm not sure whether the color of the water or the length of my exposure created the issue, but those streaks really didn't show up.  I used a six stop neutral density filter in combination with a #25 Red filter.  This particular film is really slow to begin with and I typically expose it as iso 10.  In this case, it was about 1:30 in the afternoon on a clear day in early October.  The lens was stopped down to F22.  The exposure needed for this shot was over 5 minutes... 320 seconds to be precise.

It was a failure in that it did not render the moving bubbles in the water in the manner that I had hoped.  But it was a success in that the tonality of the image is really nice and I think it portrays the feel of a fall day in the badlands quite nicely.