This Month’s Story took place just this past February in the Wethersfield Meadows.    I have been working on a presentation of approximately 20 images for the free Photo Arts Xchange portfolio sharing May 3-5th in Rocky Hill, CT.    The title of the portfolio is Winters Reflections.  Over the years I’ve accumulated a few winter images and most recently have focused on creating images of Ice, its texture and reflections in various forms.

   Reflections in water have much the same effect a mirror does in a room, adding depth and a feeling of dimension.  In a 2 dimensional photograph that is always of paramount importance.   I very much like the random shapes of trees and their branches.    Combining tree branches reflecting their shapes in water was an easy choice.   For this project I’ve used both film formats, the 5×7” film size as seen in this months feature image and also used the panoramic 7×17” camera.     Combining the texture of ice and the tree’s reflective differences against the ice and water is another creative approach to reflections.   The image below was made with the larger panoramic 7×17″ camera, used here to make a closeup and nice complimentary image to the Winter’s Reflection portfolio.   

   So back in February I took off on a Sunday afternoon still recovering from a foot injury I would not be able to venture too far from the car.    I decided I would go down to the back roads of the Rocky Hill Meadows that run along the Connecticut River. I had grown up in that area and know every road down there and most likely would not encounter anyone else.    Unfortunately, the Rocky Hill Meadows has been closed to vehicular traffic for a year or so by the landowners.   The Wethersfield Meadows just to the North provided easy access to cruise the several miles of roads along the river banks.   I came upon an area where the river was not terribly wide which brought the far river bank closer.   There was a nice pattern of trees reflecting in the water so I stopped and had a closer look with my viewing card.

   A Viewing Card is cut out to the exact size film I use and is black on one side and white on the other.   Each lens has a focal length measured in millimeters.   I know the conversion of each of my lens from millimeters to inches so you simply hold the black side of the viewing card and move it in / out and up / down till you come upon a composition that is pleasing.   Make a guess as to how far the viewing card is from your eyes in inches and choose that lens to replicate the composition you saw through the viewing card.    The card is Black and White for good reason when composing the image looking thru the black side your eyes tend to dilate more. This allows you to see more detail in the shadow areas to help in establishing what details are important and thereby determining what exposure to use to reproduce those tonalities.    That is just one of the many tricks I use to create an image with detail and clarity not usually seen in the first glance of a scene.  The white side of the card is then turned around to help with imagining the scene in front of you on a white mount board and gives an idea which tonalities are important to develop the negative so they render with texture on the final paper the photograph is to be presented on in its final form.

  Since reading the Net and Butterfly book on how the creative mind works I have become keenly aware that creativity is within my grasp.  This image is a great example, I began to think about how to make this different then other tree reflection images I will use for the PaX event.    There were large ice flows moving downriver and I knew there was no possible way to stop action.  Why not use a shutter speed just slow enough to blur the ice flows as a means to be more creative and still have tree reflections as a component to the image.  The strong river current carried each sheet of ice quickly in and out of my image area.  Fortunately, the ice flows had some white areas but also had some darker areas that would render in grey tones.   That interaction of grey tones and lighter ice would create a greater area of impact, especially when split toned in the manner that I use.

   I used an 18” lens which is the longest I can use on the 5×7” Deardorff camera.  The balancing act of such a long lens and relatively wide aperture is made much easier because of the features a view camera has.   I loosen the back of the camera where the film is inserted and slightly tip the rear standard away from the lens.  What this does is alter the plane of focus so it more favors a close (ice flows) to far distance (trees across the river).  This creates a gradually increasing “funnel effect” of sharper focus from the small funnel opening (ice flows closer to the camera) to the large end of the funnel (far off trees & river) in the Horizontal plane.  That one small correction is what allowed for a sharper horizontal focus near and far while still being able to use a relatively wide aperture setting of f22.

   The wide f stop is important because it allowed for a 1/2 second shutter speed which just blurred the fast-moving ice very nicely.   These blurred ice flows figure prominently in the foreground and has multiple grey tones throughout each ice mass.  With 18″ of bellows extended the camera is now susceptible to the wind and I have to watch very closely if the bellows are moving before I make an exposure.   I can only watch so many things so I make the first exposure and find after developing it the reflections across the river are almost completely obscured with ice or the current of the moving water.   I made a second exposure seen in the featured image which has a wonderful balance of far off still water, a large area of the trees reflecting in the water and the blurred motion of the near ice flows.  With this type of photography, there are so many variables there’s always a bit of luck involved.  No surprise Ansel Adams once said of the 30,000 negatives he made there are only about 200 meaningful images made over his lifetime.   

   In the final process of Split Toning that I use will add another dimension because the warmer highlights offer an impression of projecting while the cooler mid-greys and darker values tend to recede.   The process of split toning is a bit unpredictable but when it works as it does in the final Silver print is sublime !!

   Notice the spatial relationships between the two images, there is much more interest in the 2nd image.  There is a near and far component to that image which is especially helpful in creating a sense of depth in a 2-dimensional photograph.  Combine the reflections of the trees in the far off strip of relatively calm waters yet another dimension is added.   The sharply rendered trees are contrasted by their own reflections seen in the calm of the distant waters yields another area of interest and palette of grey tones.    The triangles and diagonals happening within the ice flows are especially exciting for me.  However, the clear focus of the image is the blurred ice flows and when motion can be added in a Creative and unobjectionable way to a Large Format image a special image can result as I believed is the case with this month’s Connecticut River Ice Reflections.      

Deardorff 5×7” camera, Ilford FP 4 film processed in PyroCat HD developer using an Extreme Minimal Agitation technique.  Printed on Ilford Warmtone fiber paper and finally Split Toned in a Thiourea / Hydroxide combination followed by a weak bath in Selenium.