Kodak Pro Image 100

This is a bit of a weird roll. It’s the annular solar eclipse roll. But there also aren’t any pictures of that in this collage. That’s because I didn’t like those pictures. They’re just not interesting so I didn’t feel like putting them in. As a result, here are the remaining pictures I took at Valles Caldera national preserve.

You might note one very prominent spot that looks like a large picture could go there. While I was at Valles Caldera I took a guided hike and took a picture of our park ranger guide. I don’t particularly want to post a picture of someone without their consent so it’s not a part of this collage. Implicitly when someone performs on stage they are saying that their picture/video will be taken so I don’t feel as bad in regards to live music photography. It’s definitely a tricky subject but I don’t want to be so thoughtless about this especially to someone who may not want to be public in that way.

Again, this roll is one with a strong lean towards the use of telephoto lenses and I really like how it turned out overall. The compression of space works really well when things are very far apart. Unlike the pictures from Palo Duro canyon last year which were taken with a wide angle lens and felt a bit aimless, I feel like these have a lot more focus to them. It’s perhaps a bit disingenous to compare those considering how much progress I’ve made in thinking through my pictures. But I think that telephoto lenses are a bit more powerful here where everything’s far away. The most powerful example of this is the bottom left corner. While it looks quite normal, the three layers of tree covered hills is very well spaced in a way that isn’t possible shooting wide angle.

It’s been a bit since I talked about film stock. This is shot on Kodak Pro Image 100. It’s not my favorite. The colors are very cyan/orange biased, at least in this roll. That said, as you’d expect of a 100 ISO film, the grain is really tight and there’s an abundance of detail in a lot of these pictures. While I’d still prefer something like Portra 400 given the circumstances I tend to shoot in, I’d be willing to try again. It may just be the environment I shot in lended itself to these weirdly cyan skies.

I don’t really feel like I have a lot to say here without going super in depth about a couple of these pictures and I’m not that interested in doing so. So I think I’ll leave it here even if I find it a bit unsatisfying for some reason. I guess that’s my take away from this roll, oddly unsatisfying even if I like a good chunk of these pictures.