Adventures in Film: Canada

You know if you’re going to travel to Nova Scotia in Fall the trees will be spectacularly colourful. So when I went over a couple of weekends ago for the wedding of a couple of friends, I chose to take black and white film.

Let’s be honest, if you want to see great pictures of anything, anywhere, taken at any time of year, you may as well look online. I chose to take my old film camera and some rolls of black and white film so that I would avoid clichés like the plague (nice cliché).

For the most part I took pictures of the friends there, and some new friends I made, but the shot I wanted to share this week is of Cape Split, the very tip of a spit of land which when viewed on a map resembles the swept-back ears of a racing hare. From this point you can look across the Bay of Fundy and at certain times of day you’ll see the colliding tide swirling around the isolated rocks which jut up from the sea off the end of the spit.

My photo can’t compete with an Ansel Adams masterpiece, but the use of grainy, black and white film on such a dramatic, craggy subject adds I think a certain extra texture to what could have been just another tourist shot.

My adventures in film will continue, but as a side-project to my main work. I’m finding it invigorating and exciting to recall old techniques and try new tricks and tweaks and I’m sure it’s refreshing how I approach my corporate work too, but I’ll probably be keeping it under wraps a bit more until it evolves into something more like a coherent body of work.

Cape Split, Nova Scotia, Canada