Strange experience of shooting mountains with a macro lens on Kodak Kodachrome™ 25.

I rate it:
Unique scenery.
365 Dishes rated

Yes, this was my last ride on my beloved Jeep, and it was one of the most beautiful I can remember. I have sold that piece and I will miss the bubbling sound of its six cylinders. I got many reasons to do so, but the most important was that I never did photograph when driving the Jeep although I always had my equipment with me. You do either one or the other. Off-roading means full concentration on driving, you’ll never be relaxed enough to conceive a shot while behind the wheel.

Today as I want to pack my equipment I become aware that half of it is home in Germany, probably I left it there after vacation. So I found myself with the 1Ds3 body and just an EF 100 mm f2.8 L USM IS macro lens available for this mountainside tour. I can feel you agreeing that this was the ideal combination for a mountain trip. So what, weather was fine and I got on my way with my Jeep and the macro lens.

On the right hand side you can see how the macro lens worked for me in a landscape. Normally, I only use it in the studio on a tripod for tethered shooting. As I love to work with open aperture it takes a lot of time to manually adjust the focus on the right point, and the failure rate is high. You can see here that my freehand macro trial didn’t work out up on the mountain mainly for that reason.

Now, I am not optician enough to explain what there are the physics behind, but obviously it is somewhat below an optimum quality in terms of clearness and sharpness what I see in the first two pictures. As a contrast, photo no. 3 from top, has been taken with a Leica X1 and it seems to me better than the first two.

For more in-depth analysis, please refer to Find exifs here

As a post-processing I developed this shooting in DxO Optics Pro and applied to all photos a Kodak Kodachrome 25 analog film emulation. I like this old paper print finish.

What remains are breathtaking views on 2,000 meters altitude and some rare high resolution photos of that scenery. Also I will never forget that funny drunk and swearing shepard and his endless tirades. Romanian nativeness at its best.

The title picture has been taken by my fellow off-roader Alin, on my iPhone 6, it has been cropped and given the Kodak Kodachrome 25 analog film finish.