A Slough Walk with … Slough Film

We went looking for that magic combination for a COVID-Seattle-Winter Weekend day. Not too far away. Not too crowded. Not too wet. Not too steep.

Ebey Slough looked like a good risk. Less than an hour’s drive, flat as an estuary, and a small-scale, municipal park. And, Hey! We could add it to our collection of Seattle Area Sewage Treatment Facilities We Have Seen.

In the fridge I had a roll of Cinestill-50D film, which I had never used. Film stock is a funny thing for us digital-film amphibians. As far as colors go, Photoshop should be able to replicate any look. (aside: Fuji, I’m told, puts countless hours into engineering their digital cameras to mimic various films.) But I’m not very patient with Photoshop. It feels too much like work. Trying out a new film, on the other hand, is like getting a new box of watercolors. The images I got from the Slough, in fact, have a decided resemblance to painting. I can’t say precisely why. I used my Fuji GWS 690 – a ‘modern’ film camera, so it’s not intrinsic soft focus. Maybe the cat drooled in my development tank, creating an unreproducible je-ne-sais-quoi?

There are only eight 6×9 images on roll of 120 film, so at some point these pictures shift over to an old favorite: Kodak Ektar. This was about the point where we shifted from the clear blue sky of the afternoon to the low sun of the early Northern evening.

It feels as if that was the last extended sunshine we’ve seen for weeks, so the images are comforting as I sit in the gloom typing.