High-resolution resolution

When, at 20, I took some scraped-together grant cash to a camera shop in Innsbruck to purchase Agfa CT18, the proprietor suggested substituting Kodachrome II (later called Kodachrome 25) for the out-of-stock Agfa. Those 36 exposures had to be eked out over several weeks, but when I eventually viewed the slides, it was as if suddenly the sunny mountain scenes taken on my Voigtländer Vitoret had leapt into 3D. So began a thirty year infatuation with the fine-grained, saturated, but slow Kodak emulsion. 

Another veil fell away with acquisition of my first SLR, a battered Pentax Spotmatic with three SMC Takumar lenses, in 1979. The sheer (for those days) vividness of the results drew me deeper into mountain photography. Fellow Wyndham Mountaineering Club photographer Bert Jenkins introduced me to publishers like Ken Wilson, Richard Gilbert and Peter Hodgkiss, who were encouraging about the technical qualities that I managed  with my Takumar lenses and Kodachrome 25, or equally fine-grained black and white film Ilford XP. Several photos were published in books and magazines, including my greatest coup: the jacket photo for Ken Wilson & Richard Gilbert's Wild Walks 

I must admit I was a mountaineer who took photographs, rather than a landscape photographer. The chief aim was to achieve mountain objectives, and only secondly (but for me always importantly) to record that attainment. Difficulty of access to the locations probably contributed as much to my modest success as artistic merit. Bert Jenkins once likened the approach to that of a war photographer, working fast and fluently in uncomfortable circumstances to bring home the images. His admired monochromes of helicopter rescues from the Wasdale fells reinforced the military parallel. To be honest, it never occurred to me to use a tripod. This was photography on the fly, intended to impress for its unusual viewpoints accessible only by sustained physical effort.

Maurienne, Ciamarella from Pointe Fracesetti, September 1990

I got away with this cavalier style thanks to usually strong lighting, static scenes (Kodachrome 25 was mostly hopeless for climbing action shots) and editors’, by today’s standards, lower expectations regarding resolution and sharpness. My guess is that even Kodachrome 25 has been overtaken by sensor resolution, which now reveals depth of field limitations once mercifully camouflaged by film grain.

My Canon DSLR is reassuringly chunky yet eminently portable, so dangerously reminiscent of my much missed Pentax Spotmatic. The temptation therefore is to carry on as before, hand-holding and snapping away merrily. But wait – inside that nouveau-Spotmatic lurks a medium-format wolf in 35mm clothing. Its high-resolution sensor cruelly exposes sloppiness. Just as in the 80s a landscape photographer wouldn’t have been seen dead hand-holding a Hasselblad, so with around 20 megapixels small apertures and rock-steady support are de rigeur. I could save lots of money with a used, lower-resolution camera, and probably should, if satisfied with shaky results from an expensive one. But, although I’ve for the time being suspended the pipe dream of earning a living from photography, there remains the allure of being at least publishable, if not published. So I have to find a way of integrating acceptable photographic technique with ingrained vagabond-explorer tendencies.

Recent conversations with Outer Hebridean and Seattle photographers David Fleet and Francis Zera  respectively, surely no strangers to complex photographic environments, focused my mind on the issue. The writing’s on the wall: they are both critical friends whose eagle eyes no hand-held shot can evade. If I must move on from a 35mm film approach to wilderness photography and regard a tripod as a permanent fixture on the underside of my camera, then it had better be slick and manoeuvrable as a whippet. My present tripod is neither, so a compromise might be to follow David’s suggestion of an update such as this.

The next task will be accurately to distinguish those exceptional moments when only hand-held will get the shot 

Sunburst, Caton Moor, Roeburndale, Lancashire, UK, 12 Dec 2011

(because there’s truly no time or place to set up the tripod) from those when not using one is an outmoded habit.