Christmas at Mount Robson

On the 23rd I made the drive over to Prince George to spend Christmas with family. The massive winter storm that hit farther south near Banff and into the Kootenays over the weekend didn’t hit as hard on the northern route on Hwy 16.

In the winter I always take the northern route along Hwy 16 versus the more direct route from Calgary through Banff and Jasper Parks on the Icefields Parkway, mainly for safety, as there is no cell coverage or services of any kind on the parkway. I also stay in Hinton on the 2 day winter trip because of hotel costs. I can always get a decent 3 to 4 star hotel for under $100 in Hinton at Christmas, 2 to 3 star hotels in Jasper are all more than $200 a night.

Monday was a spectacular travel day, I left Hinton AB around 9am on a decidedly cool -22C clear morning. By the time I got to Jasper and stopped for coffee the temperature had dropped to -26! At least it was sunny, and the highways were bare and dry.

The trip through the Rockies is always spectacular, but it’s even more so when the snow is hanging on the trees and the skies are blue. Normally I can do the Jasper to Prince George segment in about 4 hours, Monday I took an extra couple of hours and made some photographs along the way. The traffic was light so it made for a beautiful, quiet day in the park. I’ve included my favourite shots from the day.

I’m going to settle back into shooting some film in the new year, for now I’m just enjoying making photographs again. Shooting digital this holiday season is giving me some ideas where I can go with film and letting me try some things to see how they feel before investing the time I’ll need for a film project. More on this in another post soon!

Have a very merry Christmas!
Dean

California Redwoods - Alternative Process

Back in May, my son Alexandre (and lab assistant!) and I went on a grand adventure to the Oregon Coast, California Redwoods, and a few other stops over a couple of weeks. I’ll be detailing that adventure in more detail in an article here in not too distant future.

Todays topic is alternative processes and large format contact printing. I can only dream of owning an 8x10 large format camera, but the marvels of science are allowing me to play in the game of the masters, if only in a lightweight sort of way.

On the west coast adventure I shot a number of rolls of 120 medium format film which I scanned and proceeded to make 8x10 digital negatives on vellum using my laser printer. I’m pretty pleased with the quality of the negatives using this method.

I’ve also tried using plain bond paper and then waxing the paper to achieve some transparency, I’m not as happy with the results of this method, although I can see there might be a use for the unique look it provides. A lot of the fibres in the paper show up in the image, maybe a little antique look.

Anyways, I thought I would share some of my first reasonably successful attempt at the Cyanotype process and coffee toning. These photographs aren’t perfect to be sure, but it does show that a reasonable black and white photograph can be achieved using the cheapest instant coffee I can find!

Cyanotype is reasonably cheap and easy to get into, I‘ve recently purchased some chemicals from Bostick and Sullivan, the cost per print is under $1 each. The photos shown here I developed on paper I picked up at the Cyanotype Store, it was a great way to test the waters of alternative process photography, the cost for the test was reasonable, but now that I’m moving on to contact printing cyanotypes as a thing, the Bostick and Sullivan solution is the way to go.

I used the sun to expose these prints, I’ve since built a UV light array that allows me to print all year long with some consistency. I’ll do a separate story on the UV array in a future edition.
(And include some more recent prints!)

Enjoy!
Dean Chartier

Winter Solstice

Winter has arrived! At least science tells us that it has arrived. Here in southern Alberta a chinook has settled in, it’s 9C today.

Only a small distance to the west in the Rocky Mountains a true winter storm has closed many highways and leaving travellers stranded. Hopefully it will move through quickly to allow people to get where they want to go to celebrate Christmas.

The days being so short make really good night photography opportunities. Normally I would make an event out of it and grab a tripod, an old film camera with a cable release and head out to a few favorite spots to make some photographs, but it was raining, and I’ve not been so inspired the last few months with making photographs. So I grabbed a digital camera, mainly so I could bump up the ASA setting and shoot handheld.

None of these shots are anything special, but I do like night photography, next time I’ll bring along the tripod.

Enjoy!
Dean Chartier