Fall walks in monochrome

Walking and shooting a 50, shooting black and white

Leica M262 + Leica 50/2.8 Elmar

Today was a pretty good day. We started off with a trip over to my grandparents for breakfast, some homemade biscuits and gravy over some good conversation. Then we ran some errands around town on the way home from my grandparents. Once we got home we had the requisite activity time in the front yard with Ruckus before taking him on a walk. I had grabbed the Leica quickly before we set off on a short walk with Ruckus and Jess had made the comment while we were walking that she’d wished she’d also grabbed a camera before we left. So when we got back she grabbed the Canon 6D and we set out again for a walk around the neighborhood. I took the Leica and the 50mm Elmar again.

I’ve been shooting color pretty much exclusively now for a couple months if not longer but for shits and giggles today I decided to set the JPEG preview function on the Leica to black and white and just go out with the intention of shooting monochrome from start to finish. I’ve hit a weird point lately with color vs monochrome imagery. When I try to process images in black and white I just look at the work and it feels empty and lifeless in monochrome, like something essential is missing. I hear you saying, “Uh, yeah. It’s the color…” And that’s obviously part of it. But it’s also started to feel like color has unlocked something in my work that the black and white stuff just hasn’t/doesn’t fully express. I’m not sure how else to say it in any more detail than that because I don’t fully understand what’s happening.

Having said that, this was the first set of monochrome images I’ve made in a while that actually felt like they weren’t missing that weird esoteric something. I’m willing to chalk up a lot of the legwork on that to the Leica Elmar. That lens is always able to render things in such a beautiful way in black and white. It works beautifully in color too but it really sings in black and white images. Something about that old optical design and older coatings that produces such a beautiful range of grays in black and white that give the images such a rich nuance of tones. All this to say I was actually pretty surprised to get home and start working on the photos and find that I ended up keeping all of them in black and white instead of processing them as color photos. Is my color stint over? Eh, probably not. I still really enjoy shooting in color and I’m still trying to plumb the depths of this weird intangible things that my color work seems to be getting at that feels missing in much of the monochrome work I’d done/continue to do. We press on.

We actually ended up going on another walk later in the evening. We were washing one of the cars and Jess made the comment that the light was prettier in the evening than when we’d gone on the first walk and so I said that we should take another walk. She went and grabbed the Canon again and I opted for the Leica again but threw on the 28mm for fun before leaving the house. It was fun to shoot with the external finder and zone focused but I much preferred the results from the 50mm lens. Shocking, the self professed 50mm guy liked the 50mm. Anyways, if you’re reading this thanks for taking a look!

Fall in the Spencer Mountain trail network

The mornings are getting colder here in NW Montana. We’re in that interesting time of year when it’s almost freezing in the morning and then you get a nice 30-40 degree temperature swing throughout the rest of the day. It’s interesting to dress for, especially if you’re doing any kind of activity outside. But more interestingly it means the landscape is starting to change. Leaves are turning in the trees and the greens of the forest have given way to hues of gold as the grasses have long since given up in the heat of summer and leaves are starting to turn in preparation for winter.

The crew loaded up and headed out to a local trail system in what are known as the Spencer Mountains. The name sounds much more alluring than it actually is. The Spencer Mountains are more like the Spencer hills. But nevertheless there’s a nice network of trails that runs through some pleasant second growth forest. The south side of the trail system is especially nice because it’s not that heavily trafficked either by bikers or hikers. Bikers tend to prefer the North section of the trails because it’s better MTB terrain, and I’m not sure why more people don’t walk in the southern section of trails. But I’ll take it. It’s one of the few accessible places in the Flathead that still feels like what walking in Montana used to feel like. But that’s a rant for another day.

I grabbed the Leica and the trusty old Zeiss 50/2. I hadn’t shot the Zeiss in a while since I’d either been shooting the Leica Elmar or just shooting the 6D instead of the Leica. As you might expect from that combo, the results are perfectly great. The files out of the Leica are lovely and the Zeiss Planar is a wonderful lens to work with. I set up the 6D with the 50/1.8 for Jess. She ended up not liking the 50 that much. She said that it felt too restrictive. Most of her photography experience has been on cameras with 35s so it makes sense that the 50 would feel a bit too tight. All in all though it was a good time and a good walk. Thanks for stopping by and hope you enjoyed the photos

Some Thursday morning in September

Bikes were ridden, photos were made

Canon 6D + Canon 28-70 f/f3.5-4.5

I spent the morning at the DMV getting registration and license plates for a car we purchased recently. Between finding out that they had moved buildings since I’d last gone there 6 years ago and then forgetting my wallet and having to race home to grab it and try and get back before my number was called, good times were had. The process was more efficient than last time though so it’s still a win. When I went to install the plates on the car at my wife’s place of work I walked inside and she asked what I was going to do today. I shrugged, and said, “I dunno. Nothing? Maybe work on my bike like I was going to do yesterday? Maybe I should just ride my bike and not work on it at all?” She smiled and said, “I think that’s a great idea, I fully support that.”

The ol’ CREV: Country Road Exploration Vehicle. A single speed MTB will get you a lot of places

I brought up the old Surly from the basement, aired up the tires and filled up some water bottles and as I was about ready to head out I thought, “Hey, I should grab a camera.” So I grabbed the Canon 6D and threw the classic 28-70 zoom on it. I could have probably gotten away with just shooting the 50/1.8 but, sometimes a guy wants to shoot other focal lengths (I didn’t really, pretty much everything you’ll see was shot at 50mm). I haven’t ridden much at all lately, much like I haven’t photographed much at all either. Now that I think about it maybe I’m just depressed or something (sarcasm). Anyways, with camera in the frame bag and bike under a Brooks C17 that seemed so much harder than I remembered I pedaled out of the driveway and off to destinations only vaguely known.

I have a bad habit of not doing things for a while and then when I go back to doing them I jump in up to my neck and try to do it like I never stopped. When I set out from the driveway on the bike I said to myself, “Okay, I' haven’t ridden regularly in a while so I’m not really gonna push it. If I ride 10 miles and feel done that’s fine.” But then I just kept riding and by the time I made it back to the house I’d covered 24 miles. It was a nice ride though, even if I was feeling it by the time I pedaled back in to the driveway. I pedaled through a lot of beautiful farm country that sits in the valley floor surrounding the Flathead river in the Flathead valley.

The aesthetic fetishism of rural America is maybe a kind of cliche photographically speaking, and maybe I’m guilty of it but I also find that there is a definite beauty in it, that there is something worth sharing there. Maybe it’s too much Wendell Berry seeping in to my philosophical perspectives but there is something to be learned along a quiet country road and the ways of life that take place along them, and they are lessons that only seem to be more important as we hurtle headlong in what feels to me to be deeply the wrong direction.

It feels like beauty is such a constant theme in my photographic work. The answer to the question “Why do you make pictures?” can, for me, generally be boiled down to an experience of beauty. Maybe this is boring, but I don’t think so. I tend to side with Robert Adams that beauty is not an antiquated category destined for the dustbin of art history. Beauty means something more than a simple historical aesthetic category. Beauty tells us something, it tells us something about ourselves and about the world that we dwell within, it tells of the promise of grace, it is a touchpoint with divinity and all that this entails for us, all that it calls for from us.

But now I’m rambling. And you probably didn’t come here (how did you get here anyway?) for a dissertation on aesthetics and religion, but hey you got one anyways. Tell you what, we’ll wrap this up with one last photo of the slowly meandering Flathead River as it snakes its way along the valley floor, set against the Swan range in the distance. A beautiful landscape, and maybe more.