Experience 1: Excitement in the Pine Barrens
The first time I audibly gasped in front of a scene.
I wasn’t sure what the Pine Barrens were. I had heard about them for a few years, but thought they were just some woods over in New Jersey. More, I just had a dislike for the homophone ‘barons’— relating it to the Guilded Age elite. I had, then, never given much thought to going here.
One Saturday I decided to collect my parents’ car and drive the hour to one of these spots— as the fall turned green to orange, I thought that a forest close-by may actually be nice. So I swallowed my silly thought and found a few places to drive to. One of them was off a major road that looked somewhat promising: a bog.
Before I left, my mom had warned me about the storm that would engulf the Northeast from Hurricane Isaias. I didn’t really care if it did or didn’t rain, I figured it would, at the most, add a cool angle to my photos.
I got out of my car and felt the light rain shower down. It was pleasant and cool as it fell on my hair. I grabbed my bag with my lenses and film camera, along with my tripod, locked the car door, and ventured inwards.
The tree-laden canopy meant I stepped on leaf and dirt alike. Then, a fork in the road. I opened Google Maps and saw that the body of water was to the left, so I figured I would explore the right first. I walked forward, bent under a swollen tree, stepped into weeds and into a foot of mud. The water seeped into my shoe and I almost yanked my foot out of it trying to lift it out. I looked around for a moment, finding a path I could walk on, and maneuvered my way on the sides of raised-dirt and weeds.
As I looked up, I saw a polite river that was sprinkled with droplets of rain, floating peacefully past brown weeds and green plants, between mounds of mud and the pits of trees. Certain were barren with brown bark, others white littered with green; specks of color hid in the background: dirty yellow and bright red.
My smile couldn’t have been wider and I gasped with excitement.
The photographs above I took to plan out what I would eventually take on film. In my arsenal I had two cameras: my digital OMD-EM1 Mark II with a 17mm lens and a 50mm lens, and my Mamiya DTL1000 35mm film camera with Ultramax 400 with a 35mm lens.
The first question was what did I want to include and what I wanted to leave absent: there was a pesky tree that bent under the rain and curved unnaturally that served as left-boundary; I knew I wanted the foreground to capture the river and rain; the top ought to be the trees (I am normally not a fan of including a ton of sky already); it should be balanced and contained (not symmetrical).
This took a bit of work in order to answer. And even though I did have multiple options, I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with my early interpretations.
What made me figure out what I wanted the photograph to look like what not the contents, but the settings.
I made the image much brighter, leaving my shutter speed open for longer (around 1/8th) and widened the aperture (f/11) in order to see everything. While I was first focused on making a subject pop, I was now concerned with the tiniest of details that were hidden in front of me.
Now, I took out my film camera, stuck it on my tripod, angled it correctly, and pressed the shutter. I took my first photo with the above settings, then deciding to do the lowest aperture (f/22) and keeping it open for a full minute.
Later, I realized I had not properly wound the film.
Thankfully, I took the below shot with digital!