People drive crazy in the mountains, and why I love film.

While I’ve shot 4x5 for quite some time, I decided to finally dive headfirst into 8x10 large format photography.

This period also marks my complete break from all digital photographic equipment as I let go of the CFVII digital back used on my Hasselblad 500cm. Although it was novel to have, and despite the fact I did get great use out of it (I did use it for my Human Dignity Project, for instance), it simply took something away from me.

It was a dulling of the joy and amazement of photography. You see, there’s a magic to the way light, emulsion, and chemistry come together to create a photograph. That kind of child-like fascination and excitement simply doesn’t come about through the precise, almost sterile, viewfinder of a digital camera (at least, for me).

I recently took a trip to the Seneca Rocks area of West Virginia for an extended weekend of photography. For the uninitiated, driving in and around the mountains of West Virginia isn’t the idyllic experience one would naturally assume. Not only are the roads continually and wildly meandering, but people drive crazy in the mountains; your attention is less on the beauty of the region but on the road, on not dying in a horrific crash or tumble down the mountainside.

I have to assume they’re locals, because driving at 55mph seemed absolutely reckless and downright irresponsible… but that’s the legal speed limit. And signs telling you to slow down to 40 or 30mph around a blind curve? Fuck it. They’ll take it at as fast as physics allows. Perhaps if I lived there I would too.

It was on one of these days I visited the Dolly Sods Wilderness, white-knuckling the steering wheel up the unpaved road and dangerously hugging the edge to allow for passing caravans of cars to reach the top, the highest plateau east of the Mississippi River.

Surviving the journey, I put on my pack containing my 8x10 Intrepid MKII camera, three lenses (120mm, 240mm, and 360mm), filters, film holders, and other accessories—not exactly what one would consider “ultralight”—and took to wading through the thick blueberry shrubs, between baby spruce trees, and over lichen-covered boulders to reach an area that wasn’t clogged with day hikers and sight-seers.

Lichen-covered boulders on the highest plateau of Dolly Sods Wilderness overlook the West Virginia landscape. Shot on Ilford HP5+ 8×10.

Can I say I’m a boulderer now? Probably not. But my still feet hurt, and it’s been nearly a week.

After an hour or two, I took refuge under the shade of one of the boulders. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the Fall sun was intense, perhaps even more so at that altitude. It wasn’t the perfect light I was hoping for, especially shooting Kodak Ektachrome. Although I find myself continually surprised by the film’s dynamic range, extreme ranges between shadows and highlights can render scenes difficult to capture without sacrificing some kind of detail.

I didn’t really know what I was going to photograph on that plateau. In fact, most photographers don’t. They simply show up, look around, and find something that looks interesting. Of course some may have a plan, but the fun is in exploration and happenstance, isn’t it?

As I looked in the direction of the sun, I noticed the red leaves of the blueberry bushes radiated one of the most saturated reds I’d ever seen in nature. Looking away and with the sun to my back, the red leaves’ color became muted, less saturated. Having just spent over an hour slogging through them, I hadn’t really considered photographing them until that moment. So I decided I’d shoot into the sun, usually what one avoids, in the hopes of capturing that bright ruby-red color as close to as I saw it in that moment.

I pulled the camera from my pack, extended the bellows, affixed the lens, and reached for my light meter… and it wasn’t there. I had taken it from my pack and left it back in the car.

My heart sunk, and my feet, which had precariously jumped from boulder to boulder under the weight of my not-so-fit body and camera pack, throbbed just thinking about a return trip. I had two options before me:

1.) Hike back to my car and retrieve my Sekonic and hope the sun didn’t change in a couple hours.

2.) Wing it.

Every photographer who has the most basic of skills knows the “Sunny 16 Rule”; on a sunny day you set your aperture to f/16 and the shutter speed to the ISO of the film you’re using. Yet, slide film is fickle, and it isn’t cheap. My personal (failed) experiences, and the advice of other great photographers (Ansel Adams and Fred Archer), has taught me to meter the highlights and the shadows and expose for the middle gray. The problem, of course, is I didn’t know the range between the highlights and the shadows.

I decided to wing it.

I finalized my composition, checked my focus about ten times (with an 8x loupe), checked and rechecked the aperture and the shutter, loaded my film holder, crossed my fingers, and fired off a shot. And without much fanfare, I disassembled the camera, re-packed it, and made the trip back to my vehicle.

Driving down the mountain and surely destroying my car’s shocks, there was fear. There was excitement. There was anticipation and hope that the day I had spent hiking, trudging, and bouldering to capture this photograph would not all be for nought.

This is why I love film photography; there’s something uniquely exciting about the entire process of it. You can’t review your photo in your viewfinder the moment after you take it. You have to wait. You have to practice patience, and all the while your excitement and anticipation grows and grows… it’s similar to what it used to feel like as a child when you waited to open presents for Christmas or your Birthday, or waiting for the clock to hit 3:15pm on the last day of school before summer break.

The instantaneous nature of digital photography doesn’t provide that. Like everything else that caters to the now, the moments of pause, of patience, of anticipation and excitement are something being lost to the ages, and with it, our passion. Digital photography was killing my passion for photography, and so I decided to give it up.

Jesus, I sound like an old man screaming into the abyss. I’m 38 for fuck’s sake. I guess I am not old, relatively speaking, or I am old relative to whomever is younger than I am now.

After a couple more days of photographs around the Seneca Rocks area, I finally made it back to Maryland and began the process of developing the film I had shot. Holding the processed emulsion up to the light my heart again seemed to sink in my chest. It was underexposed and shooting into the sun had seemed to throw a red cast across the emulsion which I had not expected.

And scanning it, my fear was confirmed. Indeed it was underexposed, and indeed it had an odd red cast as the image below shows. The emperor truly has no clothes.

Most digital photographers don’t share their “raw” images because it’s either embarrassing or because it’s not what the final image will actually look like. Often they take the “spray and pray” approach and spend much of their time sitting in front of the computer sorting through hundreds or thousands of photos, choosing only a few to edit, or, in the case of wedding or special event photographers, will simply apply a filter to the entire set.

What you see, sometimes, is nothing like the original. Its gone through massive amounts of color correction, filters, and other editing to become less a photograph and more of a photo illustration. I’m not exactly knocking this approach, but I do find it soul-crushing, especially since I did it for many years when I served as a Mass Communication Specialist in the US Navy (albeit we weren’t allowed to do too much editing beyond basic color correction, cropping, and exposure adjustment).

On the other hand, most film photographers, especially large format photographers, spend so much time on composition, setting, focus, and exposure that “raw” isn’t much different from the final product. Often times the photographer spends more time trying to flesh out the inaccurate color rendition of the scanning software used to digitize the film than they do trying to salvage poorly shot images. And in the case of self-developers, it may be trying to salvage what would have otherwise been a great shot had not some accident or unforeseen issue occurred in development.

As I said earlier, film isn’t cheap. A sheet of E100 8x10 runs close to $30. That’s a hefty price tag to not spend the time trying to capture the most perfect shot one can.

For the digital photographer, snapping ten photos or ten thousand doesn’t make any difference on your bank account balance. And it’s for this reason that film photographers take far less photographs and are more intentional with their shutter actuations, not just because the process requires it, but because the economic model and practicability simply doesn’t support it; I can’t carry an endless supply of 8x10 film holders, for example.

Likewise, developing is expensive, especially if one is sending it out to a professional development service. And self-developing, while cutting some of the cost, comes with a hefty time commitment: processing one 8x10 sheet of color slide film in a daylight tray takes nearly 30 minutes.

Who wants to waste their time developing piss-poor photos?

But, in this instance, the “raw” is much different than the final, digital version you see below. In the oldin’ days before computers and scanners, photographers could still manually edit their photos in the darkroom, so I guess my efforts here aren’t too offensive to the analog purists.

Yet, I did not spend as much time as one would expect on this edit. Increasing the exposure and adjusting some of the highlights and shadows was about the extent of it. I can’t really take credit for the outcome, either; I am continually surprised how resilient Ektachrome can be when adjusting exposure in post.

It was a relief, and that sinking feeling was replaced with satisfaction.

Here you have it: the final version. This is as close to what I saw that day or at least as close to my mind’s memory; the colors are just as vivid and saturated as I remember.

I love it. I love the slight lens flare washing in over the red leaves like a fog. I love the color, the saturation, the focus shift from the bottom right side of the image to the top left and the gradual bokeh behind it. And I love the fact I went through seemingly every human emotion from before I activated the shutter to looking at it on my screen now.

I love everything about it.