December Macro in B&W

December is a month that fails to motivate me to take outdoor photos. Very short days, dull weather conditions and depressingly bare flora contribute to poor motivation. Still, I decided to get up early and go for a hike. It's good for health, both physical and mental. I forced myself out of bed and drove to the Tricity Landscape Park with a simple setup: my trusty Pentax P30N, a polariser and a few lenses. I wasn't expecting vibrant colours and the weather forecast was as dull as it gets so I took a roll of Rollei RPX 400, a somewhat fast black-and-white film.

I didn't have a clear idea of what I should focus on. However, I quickly noticed two things. First, the temperature was below the freezing point and I was greeted with frozen puddles, frost and a tiny sprinkling of snow. Second, upon closer inspection, I found that between the thick layer of brown fallen beech leaves and frozen muddy paths, there were plenty of small details to be photographed: frost-covered moss, intricate crack patterns in the deadwood, gnarly tree stumps and wood-decomposing fungi. I quickly decided to focus on close-up photographs using one of the lenses in my waist bag: the SMC Pentax Macro 1:4 100 mm.

Not all of the photos were close-ups. This lens focuses up to infinity, so I tried some tight compositions with a compressed perspective shot from a medium distance. I'm not enamoured with these but they were nonetheless a fun exercise with a focal length that's mostly impractical for forest landscape photography.

An idea that's always at the back of my head when I'm in a forest is concentrating on textures. Whether it's wood grain, cracks in the wood, bark, lichens, dirt or leaf veins, there are always plenty of textures to be found in any forest. I captured a few photos, mostly focusing on wood and moss.

I found a few patches of moss sprinkled with snow that I thought looked interesting. I also stumbled upon an impressive patch of trumpet cup lichens and took a few shots.

I wasn't specifically looking for fungi but even in December, they're plentiful, though not exactly on the ground. Tree trunks, felled logs and wooden benches spoiled me with a huge choice of compositions.

Leaves were mostly brown and ugly so I paid little attention to them. Still, they made it to a few of my compositions. In one case, they were still green and firmly attached to a living plant. I'm not thrilled with how these photos turned out though I like the one with frost on the edges.

All things considered, it wasn't a bad photowalk. I didn't produce any banger portfolio shots but it wasn't my goal. A good number of the photos were keepers. I'll repeat a similar exercise with a less grainy film stock.