Dang, I almost missed this one!
Not that I haven’t been trying. This week I have been working on a story about the Oklahoma wheat harvest and have traveled from one end of the state to the other so very busy and haven’t had a lot of time to develop film and post pics. I have shot a LOT of film during the past week so plenty saved up now. Got today’s post in just in time.
My 35th wedding anniversary was this past weekend and my wife and I took a backroads tour of northern Oklahoma – something we enjoy doing on a regular basis. We just jump in our Jeep or dual sport bikes and travel dirt roads. I have hundreds of interesting waypoints loaded into my GPS so that when we are out traveling we can swing my one of these interesting places and check it out, which is what we did this time.
I call this photo “Cowboy Tombstone” because it is a marker put up in the 1930’s to commemorate cowboys who lost their lives in and around the area in the late 1800’s while driving cattle along the Chisholm Trail. There are actually two markers right across a dirt road from one another, near the ghost town of Jefferson. The other marker is for the Sewell Stockade, built as a place for weary drovers on the Chisholm Trail to rest along the arduous journey. If you go to my Ride Oklahoma web site you can find all kinds of interesting markers such as this.
I shot this picture with my Toyo VX-125 and a Nikon 210 mm lens. I normally would use my 150 Rodenstock, but I don’t yet have a Coken Filter adapter for that lens. I have been practicing shooting black and white film with a red filter, which I did with this photo, trying to darken the skies to add drama to the photo. I am still learning to shoot with that filter and I believe I underexposed this image. It lacked contrast in the negative. I was able to add contrast in Photoshop but I need to figure out a way to do this better with the original negative. For this shot I increased my exposure about one stop to compensate for the filter. Next time I think I might try two stops. But that might be a few pics down the road since I took a lot of pictures this past week before I developed this picture.
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