Every fall, for over twenty years, the members of the Monochrome Guild have traveled on a weekend outing together. Usually it was in late October or early November, when things were quieter, and the hotel accommodations were more affordable. Most years we headed to Jasper, but sometimes we also visited Banff, Kananaskis Country and the Badlands.
In 2019 we had our last weekend outing before Covid, and that one was to Jasper. In 2020 and 2021 we were not able to make our annual pilgrimage, though it is hoped we can start up again in 2022. I recently completed the development of all of the negatives that I shot in 2018. This includes the ones from our Fall Photo Weekend trip that year.
It seems so long ago now, and I can't even remember for sure how many of the Guild members were on this one. I know that there were at least four or five of us. We stayed at my shop in East Coulee and spent three days visually exploring the Badlands of the Red Deer River Valley and the immediate area. The weather conditions on the first day were pretty good but after that it got quite a bit cooler, overcast, and windy. This was on October 26, 27 and 28 of 2018.
Over those three days I set up my view camera twenty times. For the most part I exposed two or three sheets of film at each set up. The one time that I only exposed a single sheet was a detail shot of a dead cottonwood tree. That image was lost... not sure if it was a processing or exposure error. Even with my years of experience with the big camera and in the darkroom it is not all that uncommon that I sometimes mess something up. This is one of the reasons that I generally expose more than one sheet of film. The other reason is that I like to try different film and developer combinations and see how they respond to different lighting conditions and subject matter.
The nineteen scans that I have included below are all of the shots that I took over this three day weekend [with the exception of the one that I lost]. I tried to select the best of the multiple images from each set up. Not all of these are "keepers" and worth printing in the darkroom. There are a couple in here that I may take a stab at printing, while the rest will only be shared online.
I recently shared these with the other Guild members. I hope that it stimulates some discussion about photography and perhaps motivates us to get out shooting again this spring. Hopefully we are able to organize a group outing this fall, and maybe one in the spring as well. I'm also hopeful that some of the others that were on this outing, share their photos. I'm interested to see how they might have interpreted the same subject matter. Surprisingly, even though we are often shooting the same subject, at the same time, under the same conditions, the compositions are often very different. Individual personalities result in a very different way of seeing things, and I find that fascinating.
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