Mistake in Estes Park

Jan 29

Rocky Mountain National Park, Nikon f100

Shooting film in the Rocky Mountains is nothing like shooting anywhere else. The light is usually overwhelming, and the skies are a shade of blue you just don’t see in the Midwest United States. Decisions need to be made carefully and in situations like this I don’t have a lot of experience. So, when we visited Estes Park Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park, I decided to use the most advanced camera I owned, a Nikon f100. Metering the light for exposure and being able to autofocus seemed to be the perfect piece of gear to capture shots at 10,000 ft above sea level. I had specifically chosen to bring a roll of Kodak Ektar 100 film for this part of the trip. 100 iso film needs a lot of light but makes images with very fine grain and super sharp. This particular film stock tends to be more reddish in tone and doesn’t make for great portraits, it makes for good landscapes though.

For the trip I had been relying on the cameras ability to read the DX code on my film rolls. DX codes are similar to a QR code and tells the scanner inside a camera what iso the film should be exposed for. The higher the iso number, the less light it needs, either by time or size the lens aperture opens. Unfortunately, the roll prior to the Ektar being loaded had no DX code and I had manually set it for 400. By not changing it back to automatic, I had overridden the camera and forced it to shoot with significantly less light than it needed. If I had remembered this, I could have asked the lab to adjust their development time to accommodate it, which would have made for perfectly good photos and just a little more grain than usual. By not adjusting and running it through at the box speed, I ended up with some pretty underexposed photos. Besides the importance of learning a valuable lesson I do think I ended up with some neat shots. There’s a real Lunar feel in the mountains, and a vintage vibe on what I was able to grab at the Estes Park reservoir.