Covid Road Trip #1 was submitted to loop d24 of the Dragon Folio.
As soon as the borders to the US opened, I booked tickets for “The Presidents’ Heads”. My visit there took place in November of 2021. I met a lot of nice photographers at the Heads. A pair of them told me about this site that would eventually become COVID Road Trip #2 in April of 2022; “Old Car City” in White, Georgia. 4700 vehicles from 1918 to 1972 slowly being reclaimed by nature. It’s well-documented on YouTube.
“Twitter Barn” – Ever wonder where Elon Mollusk got the inspiration for his inventive re-naming of the Twitter platform? It was from this very barn, somewhere near the border of two States, on the way down to Georgia. TL-120-55, and some expired colour film. Could have been Provia 100F.
“Old Car City – Ford Detail” – I think this is an emblematic example of my work. Sputnik, Superpan 200.
“’50 Buick OCC” – I love the 1950 Buick. GM only made that grill style for one year. Sputnik, Superpan 200.
“’50 Buick Old Car City, GA” – A different 1950 Buick. Shallow depth of field, scratch on the film. Sputnik, Superpan 200.
Tag Archives: Superpan 200
Ian Andvaag A32 submission
Boreal Floor. Velvia 100, TL120.
From the Esker. Provia 100F, TL120 cha-cha
Two of my contributions to this loop, Boreal Floor and From the Esker were taken at Narrow Hills Provincial Park in northern Saskatchewan. The latter was taken from an esker (ridge of earth pushed up by the last glacier) that runs along the park. It provides a nice vantage point looking over the boreal forest and numerous small lakes. Here I attempted a hyper stereo with my TL-120 by covering one lens and moving the tripod about a metre between exposures. There was a significant amount of smoke from wildfires in the area when I last visited the park, so unfortunately the sky was washed out and featureless in all of my slides.
Crested Wheat Corral. Superpan 200, reversal processed in D67. TL-120 with Hoya R72 filters.
Web. Provia 100F, TL120.
The other two images were taken at Grasslands National Park very near the Saskatchewan-Montana border. Crested Wheat Corral is in the west block of the park where the remains of several small ranches can be found. The area is very arid, and ranchers tried tilling the soil to improve the pasture, but this turned out to be a poor practice. They introduced Crested Wheatgrass (native to Russia) to the disturbed soil with limited success, but it did prevent further erosion. Large portions of the park still contains undisturbed virgin prairie, which is probably one of the most disturbed landscape types on the globe due to its agricultural usefulness. It’s somewhat off-topic for MF3D, but I made a surprisingly successful silver gelatin print from this slide by making an internegative. I think that this approach yields much better results than a direct reversal print.
Web was taken in the East block of the park in the early morning sunlight. I’ve been trying to branch out a bit and experiment with limited depth of field shots, in particular close-ups. I’m not sure if I’ve found much success. I think the image could have been improved by stopping down another stop to get a faster shutter speed, as I was not able to freeze the web’s motion in the gentle breeze, despite waiting several minutes for the wind to die down.
Stereo Staycation!
Due to the pandemic, my road trips to the States have been curtailed and limited to shorter journeys within my home province of Ontario. With all of the beautiful Saskatchewan vistas and the spectacular travel photos that were featured in the recent go ’round of the folio, I felt that Ontario should also have a chance to show off some of its breath-taking scenery.
“SLIDE AND THE FAMILY STONED”
Who needs to travel to Kingston, Jamaica when you can easily drive to Kingston, Ontario? On the way to Kingston, why not stop in Napanee? Napanee is so named for the unusual practice of its residents, who kneel while sleeping, which incidentally is not the same as sleeping while kneeling. Napanee is full of pastoral views, such as this parking lot amusement park, seen here via an EHO stereo box camera. The Altissa-EHO Stereo box camera was manufactured in the ’30s and has no provision for focusing. It has a choice of two Waterhouse f stops – f11 and f22. This image was shot using the EHO’s original single shutter speed of (I believe) 1/30th of a second. The camera has visited a technician in the interim and has had its spring tensioned so that now it is capable of firing its shutter somewhere between 1/60th – 1/100th of a second!! Captured on expired Velvia 50 and home-processed with a CPP2 Jobo unit.
“THEIR SNOW BUSINESS”
Meet Lorrie and Ray Dillard. They reside in Barrie, Ontario, which is very far North of anything and above the permafrost line. Lorrie and Ray run a successful snow-harvesting business, selling their surplus snow to countries around the world that won’t or are unable to grow their own snow. The snow is shipped out via husky-powered sled in small individual manila bubble pack envelopes twice daily. Lorrie and Ray hired Ethel Merman to sing their social media jingle; “Their Snow Business! Like ‘Snow Business’!” This image is from a test roll I shot to determine if Rollei Superpan 200 could be reverse-processed in the sometimes-available Foma reversal processing kit. Captured with Sam Smith’s conjoined AGFA Isolettes (the “Samulette”) on the aforementioned Rollei Superpan 200, and home-processed with a CPP2 Jobo unit.
“THAT’S IT (IN SPANISH)”
People not your thing? How about taking a road trip to Cooper’s Falls, Ontario? This here gas pump is one of the most photographed entities in an almost-ghost town with not that many entities in it. Approximately 14 houses in the area are still inhabited, and the waterfall after which this semi-ghost town is named cannot really be seen (or photographed) without trespassing, as it is situated on private property. The title of this image is of the crossword puzzle question type, and by request, I am not supplying the crossword puzzle answer here. Captured with an as-fine-tuned-as-is-possible-with-a-Soviet-camera Sputnik cobbled together of donated parts, on expired Provia 100F and home processed with a CPP2 Jobo unit.
“SCREAMING HEADS OF MIDLOTHIAN”
Every year, Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day falls on the last Sunday in April. It is an excuse for my daughter and I to spend a day together photographing various locations in Ontario using pinhole cameras. I will usually pack a “lensed” camera in addition to my pinhole camera(s). On WPPD 2019 we visited artist Peter Camani’s residence which hosts his grand scale outdoor art exhibition. There are various shapes of cast concrete screaming heads situated throughout his 310-acre property near Burk’s Falls, Ontario, each sculpture being in the 15-20 foot tall range. On this occasion I had packed my Hasselblad SWC, and I can’t remember if I was consciously trying to capture a stereo cha-cha image or not. In any case, I found an uncut roll of film with three pairs of images that looked like they might work as stereo pairs. Despite some anomalies between the left and right chips, my brain can fuse these images into a stereo image. As John Thurston likes to say, “your mileage may vary”. Hasselblad SWC, yellow or orange drop-in filter, expired Kodak Aerochrome film, home processed with a Jobo CPP2 unit.