It’s currently 33 degrees here in Northwestern Montana. Which, is admittedly kind of a balmy winter so far. It was 40 degrees earlier today and there’s not a flake of snow on the ground. But, that’s a tangent and mostly filler for an introduction to this blog post.
The other night I was going back through work that I’d shot earlier this year and realized I’d never posted work from a particular walk that I took in August. On the surface, that seems relatively random. I wasn’t blogging again on this site at that point, so I wasn’t yet creating blog posts about the walks I’d been taking. Who cares, right?
But what I really found interesting about this series of images is that they’re the first time I really felt that the 28mm focal length and I clicked. I’ve written about the 28mm focal length before and talked about how difficult it was for me to get along with it at first. More on that here. This was a walk in what’s called the Owen Sowerine Natural Area, a beautiful little parcel of land not far outside of town. Despite Google reviews complaining about lack of parking and dogs not being allowed (both of which I think are good), it is truly a little gem in the Flathead Valley offering a number of gentle trails through some beautiful riparian habitat.
I still don’t really understand why the 28 clicked that day. I had taken the 28 out on multiple occasions, both around town and in the woods trying to get the hang of it, and in retrospect I was making okay photos with it on those outings but for some reason that walk in the OSNA in late August was the first time that shooting it felt natural, like I was finally seeing on its terms. I had brought a roll of Kodak Tri-X and I wasn’t very far in to the walk and I had already shot up the entire roll, and I was kicking myself that I had only brought one roll to shoot. I knew there was something interesting about the images, I was so excited to get home and develop and scan the film and I was not disappointed.
In the piece I wrote on the 28mm focal length I talked about how it is a double edged sword. It is a lot to handle, deep depth of field, wide angle of view, lack of compression, etc etc.. But, those very qualities are what give it its distinctively beautiful look. The wide field of view allows you to pack a lot of information in to a single frame, the deep depth of field allows it all to be in sharp focus, and the lack of compression makes it capable of layering, again being capable of carrying interest and complexity through the frame. It’s a focal length that resonates well with complex, holistic imagery, so long as you embrace it. If you fight the focal length it fights back and you’re likely to end up with frames that feel vague, empty, etc..
I think this walk was a kind of gestalt shift for shooting the 28 for me because it was the first outing where I came to (for reasons that are mysterious to me) embrace the focal length for its unique capabilities and lean in to them. It all fell in to place organically and the results were really beautiful, in my opinion. It was after this outing that I began to really shoot the 28 regularly and now that I have this lens back I’m looking forward to diving back in to it.
Below is a selection of images from this walk. As noted in the captions on the previous images: Camera was my trusty Leica M4-2, the TTArtisan 28/5.6 (the knockoff Summaron), and a roll of Kodak Tri-X rated at box speed.
