Freeze Up

Here is a scan of another recent negative.  This one was taken on the Fall Photo Weekend up in Jasper with the Monochrome Guild in early November.  It was -19C when we were shooting here at Portal Creek on that Saturday morning.  There was more ice on the creek on this occasion, than any other time I have been here in the past.  Layers of ice were forming in the creek bed, with only a small central channel left open.  The ice was building up so thickly that the spot I was standing on to take this shot, on the gravel shore of the creek, was actually over a foot below the level of the freezing creek surface in front of me.  This particular image was shot on Kodak Tri-X Pan 320 with my Ebony 4x5 view camera and a Nikkor 300mm lens.  The film was processed for normal contrast in PMK developer for 9:35 minutes.  I had to tilt the rear standard of the camera, and stop the lens down to F115 in order to hold the depth of field and render the foreground frosty branch and the background rocks in sharp focus.  This resulted in a shutter speed of 8 seconds, even though the image was taken in fairly bright, clear light, around 12:00 noon.