When Texas Froze Over
I live in the Austin area, and this past week has been freakishly cold and snowy. Of course, I wanted to get out and take some photos. I had gotten my hands on a roll of Fuji Eterna RDS 4791. Fuji's site says this stock was "intended for making archival black and white separations from color digital masters. This film is designed for a digital separation workflow using a film recorder." I have no idea what that means, but it was rated for ISO 6-25, so a bit of white sky and light bouncing off the snow gave me a chance to shoot it right at ISO 12. Another new thing is that the the backing on this film is polyester, which has a tendency to suffer from light piping, particularly around the sprocket holes. The 35mm image area was mostly intact though, although I did shoot this in the Mamiya 645.
Of course, after the sun went down, I reverted back to my digital ways. I forgot to shoot in raw, so F for the digital noise.
I really like this film stock. The low ISO makes it sort of a one-trick pony, and to be honest I couldn't really see myself getting more unless I had a particular use case in mind, but it was breathtaking to peel this roll off of the spool.
Would be interested in getting a Texas snowstorm thread going! I'm betting @james-warner-b has some images; maybe some others who are around this area as well!
Very nice collection! Amazing that you could shoot it at 12 ISO. I have never tried a specialty film before.
I really like all the photos, but especially the iced cactus because that is just so unusual! I also shot some snowed cacti. Thought that would capture the strangeness of snow in south central Texas pretty well.
Did you lose power? We were without power for a while and ending up cooking a couple meals on a camp stove in our garage.
A little bit of time spent playing in the snow before we realized getting cold when we had no heat was not a lot of fun. 😀
Moody shots around the neighborhood trying to capture some familiar spots with the unfamiliar snow.
Also took the infrared camera out for a spin
Then I went for a little walk with my telephoto lens and tried to capture some of the plant and wildlife enjoying the snow.
I have loads more, but nothing great. Mostly I just wanted to go out and document this crazy event. Now it's sunny and 70 degrees outside and we are back to wearing shorts. 🙂
