Just a little panoramic

Been working with film lately so I looked back through my catalog to see what sort of images I’d made in the past with my genuine 35mm “full-frame” camera.  Looking over some images from Rocky Mountain National Park I realized three of them were apparently meant to be combined later into a panoramic but I’d forgotten to do it.  With digital you can just put a hand or finger in the scene at the beginning and end of the panoramic series to remind yourself but with film who wants to waste frames like that!  The images merged together pretty good (no tripod so lost some at the top and bottom due to misalignment) but the color balance was off slightly from image to image so I decided to turn the final panoramic into a black-and-white.  I think it works better that way.

OM-1, Kodachrome 64, 35-75mm lens

I worked on the contrast edges a little to improve the dimensionality of the mountains and bring out some tree detail but that’s about all I did to it after the B&W conversion.  Slide film has a much narrower dynamic range than real B&W film so the clouds are blown out a bit but you can still see their wispy shape against the sky and that’s all I really wanted in this scene.  Pity the rocks in the foreground got cut off a bit, leaving you hanging in the middle – next time, a tripod and the pivot head I bought just for this type occasion.

This is the scene south of Trail Ridge Road, east of the high pass.  The road just opened on this day after an early snowfall (this was in October) and we were able to drive to the pass, stopping along the way to admire the view.  Higher up snow covered the rocks and western slopes and soon after we left the road was closed for the winter.  The National Park Service website says the road won’t open until May, 2013 so right now the only way to see this scene is by snowmobile or dog sled!