Tuesday 11 January 2011

Phoenix From The Negative (Ob River Sunset), Siberia [Film Scan]

This is the first of a series of my old APS film shots which I've had scanned over Christmas. Apologies for the slight noise to the image - scanned at 600 DPI they look pretty good, but the colour images are not up to normal modern standards. I have added what EXIF data I can in each instance, but I'm afraid it's a little less informative than I'd like. If anyone knows how to add aperture and shutter values, I'd be interested as I do have notes for some of the shots and would ideally err on the side of completeness!

This one was taken handheld on a holiday in Siberia, staying in log cabins on the Ob north of Tomsk. It's shot with my first SLR sometime in July 2000, just pointing west across the river at one of several awesome sunsets we got over the course of the week or so we stayed there. The boat on the river is from a local ranger who took us out fishing on a misty dawn a couple of days earlier.

Strange to remember film days - I took two shots of this sunset, both hand-held. One died from camera shake, and this one lived. If I saw this scene now, with anything digital, I would shoot two or three just to get a bearing on the exposure! Then I'd probably shoot another twenty images bare minimum for this composition alone! How on earth I got through the rest of the holiday without suffering some stress-induced collapse is beyond me - to think I might have been calm enough to take two pictures, exposure unseen, and move on is very strange, and throws some interesting light on the way my photography and the technology around it has changed, if not perhaps also on me. [Introspective moment].

Hope everyone is well and enjoying a brisk week so far.

See Phoenix From The Negative (Ob River Sunset), Siberia [Film Scan]
on Flickr for additional notes.