FILM IN THE MOUNTAINS: KINGS PEAK
APRIL 30 2022
Another in the whatever subtopic on this blog! I gotta be kidding right!? Well I’m not, and I probably won’t stop with this one. You may have started to notice that I don’t really have a specific subject that I’m trying to capture. I mostly take pictures because I enjoy taking photos and looking at the results, not necessarily because I have a goal or vision that I am trying to produce. This means that I take my camera everywhere and have a catalog full of different types of photography. So today we’re going to dive into some of the landscape photos that I took while on a backpacking trip to Kings Peak in the Uinta’s.
Before I start talking about pictures, I’ll quickly talk about Kings Peak. It is Utah’s highest peak at 13,528 ft. I’ve never done it before, only heard about it so with an unplanned birthday weekend coming up I figured why not give it a shot. The hike itself wasn’t too bad, my dad and I did it 4 days/ 3 nights which was perfect in my opinion, although it could probably be done quicker. Getting to the top of kings peak was rocky jagged and exposed but really cool up top because you could see forever… expect for the fact that California was on fire when we did it so the sky was full of smoke. But still a good view. Our only issue was a storm on the 3rd day which wasn’t terrible, just some hiking in the rain and snow, the only concerning thing was keeping my camera dry.
As far as gear goes I only brought my Yashica MG-1 with me and three rolls of expired film. I was still relatively new to film photography at the time of this trip so I wasn’t super picky with what I brought. I actually only brought the MG-1 because it was the only camera that I didn’t care about if it broke and back then all I had was expired film so that’s what came with me :)
Like I said I wasn’t very picky about my gear or really the photos I took. I mostly just wanted to take photos because I knew it would be a pretty landscape. I was happy with a lot of the photos that I took but there were certain limitations with the gear that I brought so I might as well mention them.
The first thing was that I was using expired film, which I LOVE expired film, but it’s not always the most reliable and when it works it’s usually very grainy, foggy or the colors aren’t right. Basically things that you don’t want when shooting a landscape.
That photo above is with expired Kodak Gold 200 and you can see that it is really foggy (a little bit lighter and less contrasty than usual) and the shadows in the trees are muddy and lacking detail. I also had to edit that one because the sky was yellowy, and the mountains were greenish when I first scanned it.
Below is a picture of the same landscape with the same film that was unedited, and you can see effects that the expired film had. It’s not terrible but it isn’t ideal for landscapes.
The second thing, which is probably a worse thing for landscapes, is that the Yashica MG-1 has a fixed 45mm lens. By most standards this isn’t wide enough for shooting landscapes and a lot of times I found that I would have to back up to take the pictures that I wanted to take, but I’m listing it second because it wasn’t a huge limitation.
Using a standard focal length lens wasn’t an issue because I was still able to take the pictures that I wanted to take, and although it felt too tight a lot of the time, I really like how it preserved the scale of certain features. For example, the lake in the photo above would have appeared a lot smaller with a wide lens. I suppose this is the sacrifice of using different focal lengths. You can get more in the photo with a wide lens but things look smaller or you can get less of the scene but items look more or less the correct size.
In the end I didn’t really mind that the lens felt tight, and I was happy with most of my photos… so I guess the real limitation was that the yashica mg-1 had a fixed lens rather than the lens itself. Because if I had the 45mm and a wider 28mm with me I would have happily used them both.
But like I said at the beginning of the post I brought the mg-1 with me because it was a camera that I wouldn’t be too sad about if it broke. I never really liked the fixed lens on it which is why I didn’t really care if it broke. But it didn’t break, made some awesome pictures and survived a blizzard so I’d say it was an excellent choice.
I still sold it afterwards though.
Well that’s it for this week! A much shorter blog but I wasn’t rambling on about portraiture this time so hopefully you enjoyed it! See you next week and thanks for reading!