Ptarmigan Ridge, c.1995

Ptarmigan Ridge, c.1995

Mount Baker Wilderness

This b&w photograph was taken along Ptarmigan Ridge sometime in the mid 1990's and scanned from a print or negative. I returned to Ptarmigan Ridge this Tuesday (9/27).

This was my black & white film period, which lasted about two months (probably much less and better measured in weeks) or 2-3 rolls of film, whichever came first. I like B&W photography, especially from film, but I think it works better for people, urban and on-the-road settings. Done correctly, it works fine in the mountains too, but it takes a special kind of shooting, not simple snapshots in that environment.

In the 1990s, I was primarily shooting in the mountains on hikes. So I soon went back to color, and mostly color slides. Frankly, I was pretty naive about street photography at the time – one of my biggest regrets from my film days.

This would've been taken with my old '83 Pentax ME Super with a 35-70mm kit lens. I was exploring the Mount Baker Wilderness Area in the summer of 1995. I have similar photographs from semi-nearby Skyline Divide with a photograph from there of distant Ptarmigan Ridge on which I'm standing in this shot.

The annotations are best guesses and subject to correction. You likely need to view the high-resolution version to make out the annotations and even that may be blurry.