the last f/stop

South West of Dallas is the Cedar Ridge Preserve, a very large nature park with several great wooded trails, streams, overlooks, and a lake. I have a vision to spend more time doing scenic shots this winter when the street shooting is pretty much non existent, so I went down to shoot over the weekend. I brought my Mamiya m645 and the Bessa R with Ektar 100 in the 645 with some Arista 400 in backup, and some orthochromatic film I picked up at a swapmeet (I should probably write another blog post about that). I normally dislike photographing in wooded areas. I find that because they're so well shaded, the scenes are often very low dynamic range and I find it hard to compose interesting shots. Sadly, this outing was no exception. I really had high hopes for the scenic lookouts, which did yield a bit of interest but because the day turned out to be mostly overcast, there was a lack of punch I was really hoping for.    The first few frames on the m645 were lackluster as expected, b...