FILM IN THE MOUNTAINS: SAWTOOTH RANGE
APRIL 26 2024
My last "film in the mountains" post was a long time ago, you probably don't remember it. If you want to read the whole thing you can read it here - post 23, or if you just want a short summary I basically went hiking with my Dad in the Uintas and I brought my Yashica MG-1 and some expired film. It was such a fun birthday trip that we decided to make it a sort of tradition, so this time for my 24th birthday we decided to do a 4 day trip in the Sawtooth range in Idaho.
This time I decided to take it seriosly and bring a proper SLR with some fresh Portra 400 and Superia 400.
My camera of choice was a new to me Olympus OM-1 which I had just gotten of eBay a few weeks before the trip (I got lucky but in hindsight it was a REALLY bad idea to bring the OM-1 without testing it first), and for the lens I only had the 50mm f1.4 that came with it. The lens was an odd choice for a backpacking trip and it did prove to be too tight for a lot of scenes but I was really happy with the Olympus body and glass.
The trip started at Redfish Lake where we waited for a ferry (little boat) to take us across the lake to begin our hike. I loaded Superia 400 on the dock while we waited and spent some time taking random pictures around the lake. It was really quite on the lake since we were there in September. Wayy to cold to go swimming but it made for some nice quite/calm scenes.
On the other side of the lake we were greeted with a long and slow uphill to our first camp site. I can't remember how far we had to hike but it felt like forever and it was too much uphill to be bothered to stop and break out my camera. I saved all of my photos from that afternoon for our camp site which was a great call because it was a beautiful spot.
We also had a beautiful sunset that night but this was one of the situations were the 50mmm was too tight because I couldn't fit the waterfall and the bright red tips of the mountains in the same frame. This was my best attempt but a wide angle would have 100% been the right call.
I usually love the 50mm focal length but I can't lie to you guys. It didn't work out that night.
The next day was some more uphill hiking but we had the entire day so I took a handful of breaks along the way to capture some hiking scenes.
And then when we got to our campsite the 50mm proved to be too tight again and caused me to miss out on some epic sunset scenes. We were on a lake again and it had a beautiful golden shimmer from the reflection of the sunset. It was the same story as last time, I couldn't capture everything in one frame, but the coolest part was the lake so the 50mm was fine to capture that... just not the entire scene :/
The third day was probably my favorite of the entire trip. We had the largest pass this day so it was a ton of uphill hiking but the views were incredible. I'll sound like a broken record at this point but the 50mm was yet again too tight. Because of this I ended up shooting a ton of vertical shots.
I actually prefer the portrait orientation so that wasn't as much of an issue. Just something worth noting. One thing I should mention as well is that the 50mm was really good at preserving scale. The 50 has a nice amount of compression so the distant mountains still felt "close" and "taller" than they would have on a wide angle. This scale was really nice especially when I had a subject in the scene like in this one:
But that scale came at the expense of capturing more of the environment. Just something else that I noticed, and something I wanted to include so it didn't sound like I hated the 50mm the entire trip.
If you've been reading the photo captions then you'll notice that everything so far was shot on Fuji Superia. This is because I was saving my Portra 400 for the last day since I thought it would be the prettiest... I had no reason to think it would be the prettiest but I thought it was a good idea.... But guess what?!?!?! It wasn't.
It probably would have been a really pretty day but it snowed all night so we woke up to blanket of fresh snow. Which was a cool experience but it didn't translate that well to film, especially if you are like me and love overly saturated colors. I was kind of carried away with the novelty of backpacking in a snow storm so I took a lot of pictures, but looking back it might have just been a waste of film.
I shot almost an entire roll that day :/ which was a lot for me because at this point in my film journey it was probably only my 10th roll of Portra. And Portra being film photography gold it was pretty significant for me.
One good thing did come out of the Portra in the snow though. This picture was one of my favorites from the roll and has become my all time favorite "moody" picture in my collection. I took this photo at Pettit lake which was pretty much were our hike ended and by that point the storm had passed but it was still looming in the mountains which made for a very atmospheric background. There were a couple of ducks on the lake so I waited for them to swim around or make a streak across the water and then I took the picture. Not expecting that I would like it nearly as much as I do!
I wish that you could see the ducks a little bit better, but it is what it is. I'm happy enough that I got a keeper from that roll. And that was pretty much the trip! I'll leave you with another picture that I was pleasantly surprised with.
