A Misty Christmas

I've been taking pictures for about 35 years and have hardly any with snow in them. That's partly to do with the fact that, generally speaking, we don't get an awful lot of snow on the east coast of Scotland - a few times during the course of a winter we'll get several inches and maybe a foot up in the hills. However, as I described in the previous post, it's also got something to do with the fact that I always seemed to be at work when conditions got interesting.

My fingers were crossed this winter as a couple of early weather forecasts were suggesting that we were in for a repeat of the harsh winters of the last two years when we did get more than the normal amount of snow. Well, there's still no sign of the white stuff, the dominant weather pattern in recent weeks being stormy and occasionally damp but not too cold at all.

Regular readers will know that damp winter weather doesn't exactly spoil my day, photographically speaking, so I've still enjoyed getting out into the country to make the most of the dreich conditions. I've been shooting mainly with my Nikon F90x in recent weeks as it's been too rainy for the Rolleiflex SL66E. The 6x6 cost me an arm and a leg and I don't want to leave it sitting on a tripod getting a soaking while I work out all the technical issues. Superb though it is, I don't think it would tolerate too much abuse and it costs about as much to repair it as it does to buy one!

If you're into film then I really can't see past the F90x as a cheap and effective 35mm tool. Bodies can still be picked up for not much more than £50 which is peanuts for this class of camera. It's got great metering, a robust but not too heavy build and a reputation for reliability. If I'm travelling light, I'll usually just sling 35mm and 85mm primes in a bag and go. On the day the pics at the top of this post were taken, I was fully loaded with 24mm, 35mm, 85mm, 105mm primes and the 70-210 Nikkor zoom. The F90x was loaded with Rollei Retro 100.

The prints were made on MG IV RC Deluxe and are fairly "straight" apart from some edge burning and a little bit of dodging on the foreground puddle in the top pic. With weather like this, the sky tends to be quite featureless and light-toned so the top edge of the prints have received most burning in to stop the sky from just bleeding off the paper. These pics were taken in the Angus countryside about ten miles north of my Carnoustie home. I've got some more negs to print up and I'll post some of  them later in the week.