Photographing glaciers in black and white

[mmerig]

Okay, back to snow and glacial ice --

One aspect not mentioned yet is whether the surface is frozen or has some water among the ice crystals when melting. This could make a difference, especially with surfaces close to the camera where the detail is more obvious. UV light bounces around in the tiny shadows among the ice/snow crystals, and a yellow, orange or red filter cuts the UV and makes the contrast higher among the snow crystals. Bradford Washburn, who did many early ascents in Canada and Alaska, photographed those mountains, and later made many images from an airplane, often used an orange filter. It also darkens the sky, of course. During the summer at Spitzbergen, I imagine that most of the glacial ice will be mostly covered with snow, but the long arctic days may keep the surface in a melting state if the sun is out.

In snow scenes, I have tried no filter, yellow (wratten #8) orange, and red. The choice is a matter of taste; orange works well for me. It is easy to underexposed the shadows when metering snow scenes. I don't have a spot meter, so use a gray card or the sunny-sixteen rule. I usually use FP4, and it is very forgiving on highlight exposure.

It's good to know what to expect before-hand, but why not bring a few different filters on your trip, and try them all on the more-important scenes you want to capture?

[Drew Wiley]

Bingo. Prior to moving to Bishop, Galen Rowell lived right next door to a backpacking pal of mine uphill from me. And I knew who printed his shots. I've seen original slides. He went interesting places, but otherwise was just a snapshooter or machine-gunner with a 35mm camera, technically quite limited and otherwise an artistic zero. Lots of those shots were miserable to try to reproduce. I don't know why any serious large format photographer would emulate that kind of dime-a-dozen style. Since he passed away, his son heavily doctored or colorized some of his shots in Photoshop, and made them look awfully fake. SUV car ads liked them and paid his bills. But per the previous thread concerning filters, about all I can add is that you can't always precisely predict what kind of snow conditions you'll encounter. Eskimos have over twenty different nouns for snow. Rather than going nuts trying to decide whether to take a yellow, orange, or red, I'd carry one of each... Bradford Washburn was a marvelous mountain photographer, but the one I most admire is Vittoria Sella.

[Greg Y]

"I guess this was mainly to darken sky, was it not ?" (use of yellow or orange filter). Well....yes, but primarily to increase contrast. Alpine climbing, ski touring, heli-skiing, any kind of flying (not specifically for photographic purposes), means you're photographing images as they are at the moment you are there, rather than waiting for ideal conditions. Usually i end up with negatives that will print on Grade 2 or VC filtration equivalent.
Since Drew mentioned, both Bradford Washburn & Vittorio Sella are really at the very pinnacle of mountain photographers, and it is well worth looking at their work & finding out something about the conditions they worked in.

[Drew Wiley]

No. It's about enhancing texture in snow or ice, not just about sky contrast. Shadows, whether big or as tiny as a snow crystal, are blue under a blue sky, and analogously affected by filters. But back to Sella .. I suspect he still holds the altitude record for a large format camera, maybe around 22,000 ft on Chogolisa (Bride Peak) near K2 in the Karakorum. When I was about 40, one of Europe's most accomplished Himalayan climbers thought he could get me as high as Camp 2 on Dhaulhigiri to set a new record, but it just wouldn't be the same. Nobody is going to upstage the way Sella did it. I got married instead the next year. No regrets.

[Greg Y]

. Nobody is going to upstage the way Sella did it. .

Vittorio Sella did the first winter ascent of the Matterhorn in 1882 & the first winter traverse of Mon Blanc. He was the photographer of the great adventures of the Duke of Abruzzi. Among other amazing feats, they sailed from Europe to America, then up the west coast and did the first ascent of Mount Saint Elias 18008’ (5489 m). Sella processed his negatives in a dark tent.
His photographs which are not often shown outside Europe are stunning to see in person.
Also Ruwenzori, made an attempt on K2 reaching 6200m, made an expedition to the North Pole, failing, but getting further than anyone previously had.

[Drew Wiley]

One of my favorite pictures of Sella himself was him sitting at the foot of the Matterhorn conspicuously scowling. He was in his 70's just about to do another traverse of the Matterhorn when a key member of their climbing party slipped and broke a leg, and had to call off the climb. There's a famous panorama of the Baltoro Glacier he took with his big plate camera with a string of climbers in the middle-distance giving a sense of scale. Decades after it was published, someone was archiving his original negatives and discovered that there were no climbers in the original shot at all - rather, the same ones appeared in a completely different shot in the Alps. He had dubbed them in double-negative style! And once the true scale of the scene was determined, they would have had to each been about 18 feet tall to reach that particular visual proportion. Thank goodness Photoshop wasn't around yet! But the Duke of Abruzzi wouldn't go anywhere not in style. Even on the arduous expedition to Mt St Elias, the crew and dogsleds had to haul heavy brass beds for endless miles across difficult glaciers to the base camp. Doubt REI still sells those.

[Alan Klein]

I enjoyed looking at Galen Rowell's work. I thought it was very good. He used 35mm because he liked to travel light since he enjoyed mountain climbing and hiking difficult places. He wanted to move fast to catch the dawn magic hour. His column in Outdoor Photographer magazine was also very prescient. He was somewhat of a visionary. His and his wife's death at such an early age was a great loss to family and friends as well as photography in general.

[Chester McCheeserton]

I agree with Alan on that. When I was first learning about landscape photography I bought his book Mountain Light, he sometimes used a tripod, and was pretty committed to nailing pictures that no one else was getting. I definitely learned things from reading his tips, although he wasn't using large format and I would not suggest that anyone today use Velvia for glaciers. I agree, the work on the website looks way too digital now, over edited, But some of those pictures like the rainbow hitting the monastery, and those weird clouds he got were really good.

The Bisson brothers also took some really amazing glacier pictures.
Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin both photographed Mt St Helens in the 1980s with some ice too.
And check out Florian Maier Aichen, he's got some pretty insane mountain snow pictures shot with 8x10.

With the exception of Ansel Adams' Monolith Face of Half Dome shot I can't think of many pictures I like where the use of a filter played an important role.

and Greg, nice work.

[Drew Wiley]

Visionary????????????? You gotta be kidding, Alan. Someone who throws away five hundred shots just to find one that looks good on an outdoor commercial or whatever is no visionary. His career timing was lucky. It was at the tail end of when outdoor sports still shots were in demand for SUV etc ad campaigns. Now in the era of GoPro helmet cameras, drones, and mini video capture, someone has to jump off a cliff in a malfunctioning bat suit and splatter at the bottom to bag a commercial. But that's all it was. His sense of light and color was cheesy and unrefined. His airs of being a notable photographer was put on. Nobody around here took him seriously unless it was to ask advice about expedition logistics, and he hated that kind of annoyance. He was just another local rock bum who had enough sense to abandon the usual macabre climber article lingo and try to reach a wider audience. We all know his story and his self-marketing exaggerations. He wasn't like that in person. All that braggadocio was just part of his marketing personna, and he knew he was very much a little league player with a camera. Therefore he was a lot more humble in person. My interactions with him were minimal. I didn't find anything interesting in his work. Ever see any of those images significantly enlarged and put in a frame? Rather unrefined and fake-looking, to say the least. They looked better in cheap small R prints back when he couldn't afford anything else. What he actually was, was a connoisseur of travel in exotic or remote places. And he was a strong climber, even if not a superstar of that risky sport. But like even John Muir and Clarence King long before him, some of his climbing stories contain a heavy sauce of BS for sake of a readership. He filled a niche in the kind of journalistic fare NG provides, which I enjoy for its own sake. And several of us on this forum know of about serious contradictions to his alleged environmental concerns. NG likes to toot its own horn a lot, so that doesn't surprise me. He got a foot in that door with an article about climbing the face of Half Dome using chocks instead of pitons. Long before, Warren Harding cut off the iron legs of an old stove and crammed them into cracks to suspend ropes; and climbers had done it with blocks of wood for generations. But it sounded trendy and was less damaging to the rock, so the story flew. But it was really the business skill and personal wealth of his second wife that got him off the ground, career-wise. Like others of this type, his workshops were basically sales hype for whoever funded him. When it involved Fuji film, he told everyone to shoot as much Fuji film as possible - the more rolls a day, the better. When they came out with digital, he told students that's what you have to have. Snake oil. I don't think anyone on this forum would conduct a workshop that way. But that's about all he knew. Machine-gunner, and hope to get lucky. His "Mountain Light" photographs are some of the most amateurish and routine mtn shots as I've ever seen in an actual printed book. But whatever. By now people should understand that I don't appreciate gilding the lily, especially when the gilding itself is cheap spray paint.

[Greg Y]

Thank you For the compliment Chester. I don’t think it’s possible to compare Galen Rowell’s work with any number of black & white mountain photographers. Today climbing is very high profile and very publicized in magazines, movies and social media. Galen Rowell was very much in the forefront of that. If you are climber, alpinist, mountain guide who began climbing in the ‘70s there are other ( Black and white photographers) who documented their climbs and produced stunning & much less commercial work. Glen Denny and particularly Tom Frost come to mind ( in 35mm).
In color, Yoshikazu Shirakawa produced magnificent mountain images with a Linhkf 4x5 and Pentax 67.