snowy river, beautiful scenery and making good images

Just last week the snow was still here and looking soft and fluffy.

With time on my hands and the snow looking perfect I thought it was time to stop looking out the window at the perfect winter weather and join it.

This is just down the road from where I live and has got a bit of a hill, which I thought would make a great test of my skis in soft powder snow.

Especially after the last debacle I thought it might be nice to actually enjoy things.

This weekend just gone the weather has indeed turnef warmer (and foul) so looking at these images today makes last week seem all the more winter wonderland.

Lovely

Now an interesting point here is that all of these images were taken with my OM 10 camera with a Olympus 21mm f3.5 lens. Personally I love wide angle lenses for scenery and I still enjoy using my cameras with negative film, especially on a bright and contrasty day like this.

Back to the snow conditions, we've had an unusually large amount of snow here in Kouvola this year with absolutely perfect conditions. The temperature has been consistently below zero and so the snow has remained soft and powdery.

the hill there didn't present enough slope for my ski's (Åsnes combat, just a great all round BC ski) to get much flotation (even though I have the 220cm length) and as soon as I got to about that first left turn I just sank in .. to about my thigh.

:-)

but it was really worth being down there as you can see


some person had been skiing down that bit a few weeks before looking at the track, and a bunny rabbit (well ok a Hare) had been hippity hoppity along the path. The light is (as you can see) just bewdiful and being Finland and being winter the sun never gets high in the sky. I slogged along (no, its not easy going in thigh deep powder snow) over there to the right to get closer to the river and see what the place looked like there


peeking through the branches (you can perhaps just see the river over there under the sun through the pine tree) its a lovely warm day and some of the snow is just starting to fall off the trees (especially where the squirrels have been chewing the branches)

I can't help myself here and have to toss in a few comments about photographic stuff. Its just so good to look at images like this and not see blown high lights despite having massive amounts of provocation. The colour negative just handles things fantastically. Not only that, but the sheer amount of detail captured by my 35mm film is just amazing, take a look at a 100% pixel peep of that first top image:



gee-uhhst stunning innit? I encourage the photographically inclined to click on that and notice how much tree and twig detail (and pepper grain in the sky) is present. Compare it to the first image back up above.

Keep in mind this is a camera made in the 1980's with a lens from about the same year too and scanned with zero attention on fully automatic settings on my 7 year old scanner.

Makes me really wonder what the hell has gone on with the digital camera revolution. Sure, noone wants to be sitting round scanning film (especially me), but with excellent post development scanning stuff around like the Noritsu system we could all have access to great digital images and high quality printing from our images. My scanner gets a very detailed 5500 x 3600 pixels from each 35mm neg.

Wouldn't it be lovely to just drop off a roll of film and pick up 21 Megapixels on CD ... no work, no hassle, go do the shopping come back and pick it up ... thank you very much

Not bad and you'd need a camera like a Canon 5D MkII (costing a couple of thousand) to beat it. Considering this is supermarket negative (3 rolls for $6) you do need to shoot quite a bit to make that purchase worth your while. Well anyway, that's just flogging a dead horse now and not really the point of this article.


So, back to the day :-) ... with the river before me I skied up yonder around the bend ... following in someone elses tracks



there was a large flock of grouse on the ice just up around the bend, but not having a telephoto lens with me you'll just have to imagine that

:-)

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PS scans were done in a hurry with my coolscan in automated batch and 8 bit with nearly nothing in manipulation. So if the images don't leave you gasping in their colour rendition and contrast its because I didn't put much effort into it