This is an interesting shot, several things are wrong with it, but a couple of things worked, as well. The frame is from a roll shot as an experiment. This is a newly available film, Arista Premium available from Henrys in Canada. Its budget priced, targetted at students I’m told, a short roll (24 frames), rated at 400 ISO. Processing was a guess, as no data was available at the time. I processed it in Xtol at 1:3 for 8 1/2 minutes, temp was a little high at 23 C. The “Massive Dev Chart” at digitaltruth.com on the Web now includes this film. Shot with an old AIS Nikon 28mm f2.8 lens and Nikomat FTN (home market version of the Nikkormat). That’s the technical stuff.
The outstanding feature in this shot is the UFO in the upper left corner. These things happen when your rushed. It can be a challange to compose a scene, make the manual camera adjustments, steady the camera, take the picture, all while in a Kayak and not drift right past that perfect composition, or end up on the rocks. Not an easy thing when the wind is up.
A little less obvious is the Inuksuk in lower right of the image. I did spot this while setting up for the shot. The original idea behind the shot was to work with the white clouds, the sloping rocks, and the blackness of the water line. When I spotted it, it became a go with the flow situation. I have a personal issue with these rock sculptures. I feel that they have become a form of graffiti, rather than being the cultural icon that they were. These little rock piles show up everywhere now, saying “I was here”. A human has left a little pile here, for all to see, possibly for decades.
The luck of this shot wasn’t apparent until after I’d taken several frames. While not uncommon in our little corner of Georgian Bay, they are usually not seen in the open, in the middle of the day. Naturally reserved, they prefer to remain invisible except for their droppings and upturned rocks. Image my surprise when I lowered the camera, to see a Bear studying me. “Is this creature on the water a threat to me, should I go for the water now, or wait? and what does he think he’s doing anyway.”
The exaggerated perspective of a wide-angle lens suggests this animal was a long distance away. In fact the bow of my Kayak was only several feet from the shoreline rocks, and the Bear was perhaps forty feet away. A quick change of cameras (I try to always have a backup), we’re more closely focused on a nature moment.
