Alaska 2024: Roll 2 - Badlands National Park
Our main stop on our second day of the great Alaska 2024 roadtrip was Badlands National Park. I finished Roll 1 which you can read more about in the previous post.
This roll was again shot on my trusty Fujifilm TX-1 with the Hasselblad version of the Fujifilm Super-EBC Fujinon 30mm f/5.6 Lens. I decided that trying out some Kodak Double-X would be the way to go today.
For those not familiar with this film, it is a motion picture emulsion that different companies or individuals will roll into 35mm canisters and shoot in their still cameras. I purchased five rolls from Midwest Film Company in Wichita, Kansas to shoot this spring and summer. I believe that this is roll 4 of those five and so far I have enjoyed using it with just a few issues coming up that we will discuss.
I have a few images on this roll that include people so you can see the scale of the landscape that sometimes gets a bit vague without them.
One of the problems that I did have most of the rolls of Double X that I've shot are some light leaks that show up on the left-hand side of the frame as you can see in the image above. I've not run into this light leak when using other films so it might be related to the difference in the sprocket hole shape between the different kinds of film. I'm just guessing on that. Anyway, this is something that will come up in a few other images on this roll.
You can't tell at all from these images but it was incredibly windy when we got out of the car at all of these viewpoints. There was blowing sand and any hopes of wearing a hat to protect your head from the sun was out the window. I think my baseball cap blew off a few times that afternoon.
The image above would be much more interesting if it was on a color film. This area has a ton of color presented in different layers of mud and
Again the addition of people and structures into the images give you a better sense of scale of the landscape.
The previous three images give you a better idea of how the landscape changes when you face north instead of the view that you get to the south like in the photo below.
Finally I found that during the Alaska trip I fell into one of the patterns that I've always liked with panoramic images. That pattern is to put the subject in the middle of the frame and then the sides do what they are going to do. Here is an example with one of the bathrooms along the road.
This finishes up the Badlands National Park portion of the trip. We stopped next at Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota which is a wonderful tourist trap stop that is advertised for hundreds of miles before you get there. It is amazing how much the town and Wall Drug has changed since we last visited in 2012.
While in Wall, SD we ran into what would be the worst mosquitos of the trip and they even chased us out of a town park and had us feed the girls and eat in the Suburban in the parking lot of a gas station.
Our final stop for the day was in Rapid City, South Dakota at a lovely Howard Johnson that surpassed all of our expectations.