Rumon Carter | Blog

Whistler Backcountry: A Tale of Two Photography Formats

I’ve been planning the coming year.  If things come together as I envision, my adventures in 2012 will be less about organized events and races and more about self-guided expeditions (admittedly of a relatively small scale).  In this context, always desirous of documenting these outings, I’ve been considering how best to do so.  My big professional photo rig weighs a ton and, composed as it is of delicate electronics, doesn’t lend itself to being hammered in unpredictable conditions.  Chatting with a couple of the local photo intelligentsia the other day, I was bandying about the idea of getting something like the new Fuji x100 - no less delicate than my Nikon, but in a smaller package both lighter and easier to stow out of reach of the elements.  The guys asked me why I didn’t instead take a small film camera with me, given their relative robustness.  I didn’t have a good answer, apart from the fact the idea simply hadn’t crossed my mind and that the last time I’d shot film was six years ago.  Like most of us, I’ve been spellbound by the speed, clarity and instant gratification of shooting digital images. 

Spurred by this idea, when last weekend rolled around and with it the season’s first ski outing into the back-country, I figured I’d test it out. Though I don’t have a minimalist film camera of the sort the photo geeks were suggesting, I do have the granddaddy of iconic manual film cameras: a 30-year-old Pentax K1000.  Pulling it from the back of my photo equipment shelf and dusting it off I realized that (1) I only had a couple of long-expired rolls of film, (2) the battery that runs the light meter was dead, (3) an amoeboid blob had taken up residence in the viewfinder, which I couldn’t get out but - crossed fingers - figured wouldn’t show up in photos, and (4) I had no time before leaving to address any of these issues. 

So, armed with film that may not work and a camera housing a foreign object and that would require me to guess at aperture and shutter speed while shooting on the fly, I headed out with a crew of guys into the snow fields beyond the tops of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains.  I ran out of film halfway through the second day so started photodocumenting instead with my iPhone.  The photos from both cameras are below, the more familiar iPhoneography first.  Apart from a crop or two, I’ve left all images, both digital and film, untouched - no colour correction, levels tweaks, etc.  I find the sensory experience of the two sets of images completely different.  Neither is right/wrong or better/worse, but I will freely say that I feel a warmth and approachability - a sense of homecoming - emanating from the film images; something I find missing in the precision of the digitals.  Perhaps I’m suffering from grassisgreeneritis and will be over it soon, but for now I’m incredibly motivated to shoot more film.

iPhone

Film