Film and Filtration

Okay, so I walked the Grist Mill Trail from its head to swinging bridge, then walked up to the "impressive" part of cascade falls.

Before I set out on that, I picked up some Ilford Delta 100 and 400 film and a 52mm red filter. Armed with both my *ist DL and MX around my neck (which must have made me look like the most phenomenal nerd ever), I set out with a misloaded roll of color film and the 43 on the MX, and the 50-200 on the DL. Nothing exciting from the digital, but I wanted to try to set up a "black and white" shot with the red filter on a digital camera. That's what you see above. Seeing as how I'm using a quarter of the photosites on the sensor, it should come as no surprise that detail takes a pretty good hit using this method. I already knew that would happen, but it came as a surprise that the meter can no longer be trusted - the camera doesn't know the difference between film and the digital sensor, so it meters down three stops even though the red channel stays just as sensitive to the light coming in. Blah blah blah translation - trusting the meter results in an overexposed shot in the amount of the color filter's exposure factor: in this case, about 2 stops, give or take.

Figuring out a conversion workflow (because I KNEW I needed to shoot raw to do this) was an interesting challenge. I figured out that if you go to the "calibration" tab in Adobe Camera Raw and desaturate the reds and greens completely, getting a monochrome image is just adjusting the blue saturation down to the point where all three histograms line up perfectly. Then you go back to the first tab, bump up exposure between 2.5 and 3.5 stops, and fiddle with shadows until you get the overall contrast you're looking for.

At any rate, I'm taking the film in to have it sent off tomorrow; hopefully, sometime this week, I get the results of that back.

Limited distance walkabout

I "got a little lost" on the trails; they have the road closed for repaving right now, but I figured it'd be fun to walk trails to the falls instead of walking down the road. I went up ridge trail to part of rockburn branch trail, then turned around and went back to the start of morning choice trail, walked that through to connector trail, then picked up ridge trail until the trail shelter where I turn back down river road. I pulled out a stripe the same length as two tenths of a mile on the scale marker, I got about 17 of them from start to finish which is close to three and a half miles. Ridge trail is pretty tough work, not as bad as buzzards rocks trail was, but it goes into and out of several drainage creeks off the higher plateau. I ended up running most of the trail from the point where it intersects with connector trail until I met with the road again. By that point, it was 2:40, and I wasn't sure I was going to have enough time to get to the falls, set up, get meaningful pictures, and get back to the parking lot before the park closed (4:40).

Bird list - GBH, a couple dozen robins in with the 30 or 40 chickadees, small numbers of what seemed like song sparrows, but I didn't get a better look than that, three pileated woodpeckers, a downy woodpecker, female ruby crowned kinglet, and (finally!) a brown creeper.

Good walk, though, good run for those parts that I ran. I like the lightweight kit, though I should have left the tripod in the car instead of bringing it with me. I'm ordering a set of trail maps for some of the parks around here and to the north tomorrow; hopefully I can save myself the trouble of heading out without a reasonable goal or idea of where I'm going next time.