Last week I was recovering from surgery, and had to cancel my annual Hocking Hills trip that I take every year in the fall. So I spent the most colorful Autumn week in Ohio close to home. I’ll write a longer post about this later, but I did my best to make lemonade out of lemons.

On Wednesday last week I drove around to a few local spots that didn’t require any real hiking or walking to make a few images of the fall color. One of the stops was Elk Creek MetroPark in Butler County, Ohio. A short walk from the parking lot was a scene that I have been wanting to capture for awhile.

I brought with me my Mamiya 645 ProTL with my custom 135”w” pano back, loaded with Cinestill 800 film. I knew that I wanted to be able to hand-hold the camera in the lower morning light and thought that Cinestill 800 would be the perfect choice - despite the fact that I have been let down by it many times in the past with color shifts, errant light leaks that didn’t come from me, and occasional scratches that I think came from Cinestill’s processes. I should have known better.

While I was shooting the scene, I noticed at some point the exposure showing in the metered viewfinder seemed to be different from what I imagined it should be given the light. The meter reading kept trying to tell me I needed to be close to wide-open with a slow shutter, while my brain kept saying the speeds should be faster and I should be able to shoot with at least an f/8 aperture. I didn’t bring my external light meter with me as I was trying to go light. I should have just switched to guessing the exposure using the Sunny 16 rule, but I didn’t. So I just lazily let the camera shoot the exposure it thought it should have.

I bet you can see where this is going.

Later that day I developed the roll, and some others, with fresh chems. The rest of the rolls turned out great, but not the one I shot with at Elk Creek.

This shot was one of the best ones on the roll, believe it or not.

There are so many problems here its hard to know where to begin. It’s not very sharp since I was shooting much more wide-open apertures that I should have been using. It’s over exposed - this was the best I could do to get it corrected in the scan. There are weird color shifts. I took it with a boring sky. The wind was causing the water to be too rough to have a reflection. I can go on and on and on.

My grandfather always used to say that “A poor craftsman blames his tools”, which I think would be appropriate here if I gave up and blamed my poor results on the film and the failing battery in the camera’s meter. However, what truly brought me to this place of failure was my poor decisions.

With that in mind, I headed out early in the morning two days later with my GX617, tripod, cable release, light meter, and some Kodak Ektar film. On the way there were some angry clouds that looked like they were bringing a storm with them, and rain was in the forecast. Once I arrived I made a spirited walk to the spot and set up my gear.

Eventually the angry clouds moved through without any rain, and the wind died down enough to allow for some reflections to appear in the water.

This is the best shot of the scene from the 2 rolls I shot of Ektar (8 shots in total).

Fuji GX617 w/105mm lens on Kodak Ektar film. 1-stop Center-ND filter, Circular Polarizer. f/22 @ 1/2 second.

So, with some more thought-out decisions in regard to film, gear, technique, and weather timing - the end result was much better and closer to what I had envisioned.

Yes, you could argue that the GX617 is a much better camera with sharper large-format style lenses and a bigger negative, and that is correct. But that really mostly counts when blowing an image up to be huge and getting better resolution to that end. My initial try was just really bad. I own that.

While there I also shot another scene just to the North of this one. Unfortunately the wind was blowing the water around so there’s no reflection, but I’m still happy with it.