.birch forest in winter revisited

The year is 2002 (left image). I had just moved countries and was in for a proper culture shock. From the 12 months of Dutch autumn with a seemingly constant drizzle to a country with proper four seasons. Only…

Natural glitch

The year of my moving, Mother Nature ran into a little glitch. It forgot autumn. I moved in early August, enjoyed two months of summer with temperatures touching 20+ degrees Celcius and when October came knocking, within two weeks the temperature plummeted from 20+ to -15 and half a meter of snow. And it didn’t end there. It stayed around -10-ish until early December when the temperature plummeted even further down to -35. During the day. This lasted for about six weeks. It’s the longest and coldest winter I’ve ever experienced. And my first winter in a new country.

Good old Ilford 400

But all that aside. Winter makes for fantastic sceneries. There will be a lot more of winter pictures lined up. But this one is a special one. I shot this one (so that version on the left) with my Nikon F100 film camera, with Ilford 400 black and white film. It was a roll of 12, with 4 still unused. I had been driving around in the outer edges of the Helsinki suburbs, where nature was abundant, and photogenic. I had used up already 1/3rd of the roll. Then this scene came along. The black and white of the birch trees in the white snow seemed very striking to me. It gave an enormous sense of depth, somehow. I shot the last 4 images of the roll and brought it in for development that same day.
When the prints came back I immediately scanned it and digitized it. It is a bit soft all around, but I guess that’s the charm of film. It may have been my fault, or it may have been a fault in the development process. I still think it looks pretty good.

Fast forward almost a decade

When I bought my Nikon D700, full frame and with better glass, in 2010, I wanted to revisit that place. I’ve always loved the contrast of the snow and the birches. Maybe with a better camera and sharper lenses, that would get even better. By that time I’d been living in that specific area for awhile already, but it still took me awhile to find the place again. I just couldn’t remember exactly, and it might’ve been taken down to make way for residential areas. But I found it in the end (right image). I don’t know if these are the exact same trees, but it’s not far off. I’m sure of that. I converted the image into black and white in post process to match the style of the old black and white film image.