One Last Walk in 2024

January 01, 2025

Yesterday morning I took Ruckus out to a field to play frisbee and get some of his energy out before a grooming appointment. Conveniently my wife works at the pet store where he went to get groomed so I was able to drop him off and then head home with a couple hours to myself. I haven’t walked around town with my camera in a few weeks and I decided that doing so would be a good use of my spare hours. So I grabbed the M262 with the 28 and headed out the door and down the street.

I often struggle to photograph in the winter, not only out in the landscape but especially around town. Something about thew world being cold and dead just makes the vibe a little less inspiring. I think this is part of the reason that I have not really made that much of an effort to get out and shoot lately. But I felt like challenging myself, on two fronts: shooting around town in the winter and forcing myself to shoot the 28 around town, which I find to be a harder environment in which to use the 28. It can be harder to fill the frame at the distances you find yourself working at.

So I went in to it assuming that I would struggle, between the shooting environment and the tool choice, and that if I was able to come away with anything I was happy with, that would just be a bonus. I generally felt dull and uninspired most of the walk, but that's how it goes sometimes. But as I walked longer I was able to start to see things here and there, allow things to speak to me. And some photos started to emerge.

I found myself, unsurprisingly, drawn to the trees, to the twisted branches of cottonwoods stretching to the sky in quiet repose. And to the stillness and emptiness, the slumber of the world, a reflection of the ancient patterns of creation that still find themselves at work around us and through our all-too-human world, despite our best efforts to shore ourselves up against the Other of Nature.

I can’t say that I’ll miss 2024 much. It was a rough year, which seems to have been a strangely universal experience. I’m cautiously optimistic about 2025 but maybe only for the fact that I can’t really imagine how it could be much worse than 2024. Maybe. How does that saying go? It gets worse before it gets worse? Something like that. But I’d be very happy to be wrong.

Christmas morning, walking, reunited with the TTA 28

December 27, 2024

Christmas is finally behind us. Which seems weird, because at least to me I’m not even sure how it got here. My brain constantly struggled to reconcile the objective fact that it was almost Christmas with my subjective sense that it was not even December yet. I’m chalking this up to the weather. We’re having an unseasonably warm and snowless winter so far, so it quite literally does not feel (or look) like Christmas. Regardless, Christmas arrived, and it was a nice day. We started the day with an early, quiet walk in the forest, followed by a relaxing afternoon around the house before spending the evening with family.

I recently got my TTArtisan 28mm lens back from a friend and that Christmas morning walk was my first time taking a walk with it again. Having been shooting 40/50mm in its absence I did feel a bit of that jarring “Whoa that’s a lot of information in the frame” experience when trying to compose images. But it was fun, and I enjoyed working those visual muscles and trying to figure out how to work with it again.

Below is a sampling of images from that quiet Christmas morning

As noted, all the images were shot with the Leica M262 and the TTArtisan 28/5.6

Reminiscence and reflection: summer walking and embracing 28mm

December 23, 2024

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.