Had a work get-together in Phoenix for a week, so I decided to drive there and visit some parks on the way. Good opportunity to fill some rolls of film that had been sitting in my cameras with some latent images for a while.
With the reddish rocks in many of the parks that I was going to visit I decided to play around with some colored filters and black and white film. Decided to explore the extremes first, so got green and red filters. Would have loved to also get some blue filters to emphasize the haze in wide vistas but I was not able to get those in the sizes I needed, but red and green should already be a good place to start.
I encountered this little tree on the downhill of the Navajo Loop Trail and thought it would be a good image to try out the green and red filters. I thought the green might make the tree pop nicely light on a darker rocky background.
The result was not exactly what I expected, that’s why we experiment. And I am happy I did the same show with the red filter, because there the tree really pops from the rocky background, except it’s a dark tree on a light background.
The results baffled me so much that I had to check them with some black and white conversions of the digital image above.
The differences are not as stark, but that might also be because I did not process these besides the two different black and white conversions using the color calibration gray option in darktable. The difference of the contrast in the rock wall is clear though.
I still like the way the needles pop in the green filter negative, so I will see what these two negatives look like when printed in the dark room. But before I can do that I have to figure out if the nasty horizontal lines on the negatives and damage from mishandling them or just drying streaks that disappear after cleaning the negatives.