|

Old Rag



Spring!, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer.

In April, I briefly lost my camera due to a bent pin in the card slot. I sent it to Canon for repair and got the camera back in a week’s time. Unfortunately, during that time, I had scheduled a hike up Old Rag with Jon, my supervisor at the time. So, after a trip to Fed Ex, I stopped at the camera store and bought a couple rolls of film.

I’ve finally had the chance to get the old scanner out of the box and get this set of slides scanned and uploaded. While I enjoyed shooting with film again and getting some nice rich contrast and tones, I am reminded of why I decided to go digital: I hate scanning. I’ve grown tired of it. Literally. I used to fall asleep waiting for scans to finish and then slog through the process of correcting the images, slowly as my aging desktop can only handle about 4 photos open in Photoshop at a time. Color balancing is a pain because it’s not the same as a temperature white balance performed on RAW files. And then there’s the search for and fixing defects, scratches and specks on the film that the digital ICE either didn’t pick up or did a bad job of removing. It’s all time consuming, but not in the therapeutic sense that the tedious work in a darkroom is. No, sitting in front of a computer screen takes its toll.

I’m sure I’ll have some rolls of film to shoot in the future, but for now it’s primarily Digital again. So enjoy the last set of film for a while, as well as the last set from the East until I can afford to get back there.

Similar Posts

  • Attempting to Snowshoe

    This past weekend, we had a nice day on my day off for once. So I took advantage of the sunshine and warm weather to get out and hike. Or so I thought. I’ve been waiting to take my snowshoes out for a real winter trek, and the timing has been bad. I set my sights on the Gold Center trail, which leaves at the base of the mountains behind Clarkia and climbs its way up to the ridge just below Grandmother Mountain. I’ve always wanted to hike this trail, and winter seems like the best time to do this…

  • |

    Chickadees

    For Christmas, I bought Erin a new bird feeder to replace one that had been broken earlier in the summer. A few weeks ago, we finally got some seed and put it outside, but this was in the middle of a cold snap where daytime highs remained in the low 20’s, and the nighttime lows, well, we just won’t go there. For about a week, the feeder hung with no activity. Then, as the cold began to lift, there was a single chickadee in the lilac tree. It must have spread the news because a few days later, the feeder…

  • |

    Evo-WIBO and the Olympic Peninsula

    I’m two weeks on this post, but forgive me because the last two weeks of the semester have been insane. The bi-annual northwest evolution conference, Evo-WIBO, occurred the last weekend of April. If you don’t remember, I attended the last meeting two years ago and presented a talk on the results of our selection experiment. This year, I presented a poster (my first) on the use of function-value trait analysis to analyze video tracking data. In short, we can use functions to describe behaviors over time and use more details in the data than if we were to simply distill…

  • 4th of July

    Once again, I missed the fireworks. I admit that I was looking forward to photographing them, but in the end, I was busy hanging out with friends, and we decided not to go over to Pullman. I did spend much of my nation’s birthday enjoying one of the best parts about this country: its wild side. I went back up to Freezeout to hike into the alpine meadows of Grandmother Mountain, and I brought a friend with me who had never been up there. Our goal was not to reach the summit, but to simply escape the heat, enjoy the…

  • Wallowas Weekend 2015

    After a long summer with not much exploring, the pace has changed and I’ve had a fairly busy two weeks. The series begins with the return of the Annual Wallowas Weekend. In the six Septembers that I have lived here, I’ve led a backpacking trip to the Eagle Cap Wilderness four of those years, with this year being the fourth. Each time I bring someone new, and each time we explore new trails. This is the first year that we didn’t spend a night at Mirror Lake and the first year that Tyler didn’t join us. Instead, Wesley returns for…

  • |

    Roman Nose Lakes

    Last year, I tried to take my family up to Harrison Lake to enjoy a true alpine zone. When we got close, we saw that the lake had been closed due to problematic bear activity. I would have still been ok hiking up there, but my parents were wary, so we came up with an alternative: Roman Nose. There used to be a road connecting the Pack River to Roman Nose lakes on the other side of the ridge. That road is no longer passable except by ATV or mountain bike. We found that out the hard way. On the…