For my third feature here, I’m giving a permanent (bigger) home to my color film (C-41 and cross-processed slide film) photos of the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve, and running a sale on the BNW zine until Monday (11/5) at noon.
Get your copy @ Frozenwaste.land/shop .
Additionally, I thought I’d do a quick writeup on what and why I chose to do the zine, and why I decided to do it as a series of black and white photos rather than color.
The Writeup:
When I first got to the Poppy Reserve, I actually had Slide Film loaded into my camera. I had assumed (incorrectly) that the poppies would cover everything, and be in full bloom (they didn’t, and were, on a nearby hill outside the reserve.) However, once I stopped and looked at the hills, there was something utterly fascinating about the way the hills rolled and bent, how the paths around the preserve cut through the desert grass, and the manner in which the mid-morning light gave the whole place a dull but certain sheen.
All of this, in my mind, would show better and more clearly in black and white. So, as soon as I finished my roll of Rollei CR-200, I popped the first of six rolls of Fomapan Creative 200 120 film into my Pentax 6x7. Fomapan 200 (or Arista Edu Ultra 200) is a T-Grain film, and typically exposes best around 160 iso, and while my go-to developer is or was usually Kodak Xtol, I decided to expose around 100 to 125, just to capture the luminance of the desert landscape. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you which lens I used for what after the fact, but I do know I likely used the 105 and 55 (58mm and 24-28mm equivalents respectively).
Ultimately, despite producing a limited pool of photos, I thought that the geometry and tonality I captured was worth sharing with the public in a real way. By creating a short zine (rather than a 50 page megazine), it allowed me to get familiar with designing and laying out a photobook or printed project of my own, and actually commit to printing and selling it for a relatively small amount of overhead, when compared to some of the larger projects that I had priced out previously.