Year 2000 | Death Valley
This was my first trip to Death Valley with a digital camera, a clumsy Nikon 950 which would run for thirty minutes on its four AA cells. I was impressed by its smooth and delicate color rendition, like a palette of traditional watercolor pigments. All my other work there was heavily-exposed Tri-X sheet film with very soft development, so this translation fits in with the other work, even though its 1600-pixel width did not bring it all home.
▹ Technicians might balk at my method; but I’ll offer a rare technical note here: an exposure of this scene with my view camera, with a very light yellow filter, would have been 1/15 at f22, with a tilt to keep the ground plane sharp, and a slight swing to gather the palms and the key stone at left. Development would be 6 minutes in the D-23 formula in a JOBO auto-reversing constant-agitation drum – the small amount of the soft developer would be exhausted quickly in the highlights but continue working up the shadow detail all the way through.
▹▹ Richard Man, who expertly made Imacon X1 scans from the 4x5s for me in 2020, was astounded when he tried the first one – he wrote that he “almost had a heart attack” when he saw how far off-spec they were. But he bore down and got all the data, good or better than my gelatin silver prints made with long exposures under the splendid but unfortunately obsolescent Oriental VC-CLS variable-contrast cold-light head. (The brilliantly accurate and capable design was clobbered by its reliance on an integrated circuit which included the battery needed maintain its user settings and critical functions. After a few very productive years, no chips, no battery, no further use.)