Two With The Panon Widelux F8
It was supposed to be warm and pleasant when the area these two photographs were made. But it wasn’t Instead the wind was intense and rather cold. That’s the Pacific Northwest for you. A lot of times, even in the Spring, you just don’t know what you are going to get on any give day.
Luckily my intention with this particular location was to expose a few rolls with the Panon Widelux, which isn’t exactly a camera that requires a lot of setup and careful calculation. For the most part, once you set your exposure, you just point it and click the shutter button, enjoying that pleasant sound of the mechanical lens sweep.
The model was just as determined to get a few photographs made despite the cold conditions as I was if for no other reason than the fact that we drove quite a distance to get there. In fact, I was probably being a bigger baby about the whole scenario than she was. Threading film through the Widelux can be a bit of a challenge when your fingers are freezing off.
I only exposed one roll of film, squeezing about fifteen frames from a roll of 35mm Fomapan. I had to work quickly, so I dialed in an exposure of 1/125th of a second at f/8 and just started firing away. No tripod, no careful compositions, barely even looking through the viewfinder on the camera. The model just posed and I pointed and clicked. That’s it.
When the roll of film was done I couldn’t even be bothered to re-wind the film back into the cassette. My hands were too bitterly cold. We packed up in about one minute flat and high tailed it back to the car where the coffee we bought along the highway heading out to the location was still warm.
Sometimes a day of making photographs doesn’t shape up the way you assumed it would. I think it is important on those days to make something anyway. Art isn’t always about creating in the ideal conditions. Most of the time it is about doing what you can in the moment.
Camera: Panon Widelux F8.
Film: Fomapan 100 in 35mm. Developed in Rodinal.
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