Hiking near, and on, a frozen Lake Griffy
Monday, January 28th, 2008Sarah and I went hiking on Saturday at Lake Griffy. We made the mistake of not checking to see if there was a basketball game (there was). This meant we had to sit in traffic on the Bypass for a while on our way to the trails. It wasn’t a big deal, but we ended up hiking shorter trails than we’d planned. We settled on hiking the Ravine Trail and the Overlook Trail. It was a beautiful day to be outdoors, with a high temperature of right at 32 degrees F and a bit of snow on the ground. We brought Rob with us.
I brought my new/old camera with me, the Yashica Lynx 500, this time loaded with normal color print film. Once again, without a functional light meter, I had to guess at the exposure. I mostly got it right.
Sarah and Rob
We had never hiked here before, and we really enjoyed the trails. The ones we hiked mostly follows the contours of the side of some hills, never fully descending into the ravines below but offering great views of them and hiking over some rolling terrain. There were a couple of waterfalls that were frozen and looked really neat.
Waterfall
Old railroad right-of-way that was never finished
Rob, running
Sarah
Ravine
Hill
A view of the lake
Rob and me
Sarah and Rob climbing the stairs
We once again appreciated how much better hiking can be in the winter. There weren’t many people there, we didn’t have to carry as much water, we didn’t work up as much of a sweat, and many of the views we enjoyed would have been blocked by leaves on the trees.
Lake Griffy is interesting because it’s just north of town and part of campus in particular. But once you hike back a little ways you don’t hear much road noise. As we looked down toward the lake, we realized it was frozen over and people were walking and skating on the lake! I was surprised it was frozen enough to allow this, but we did have a pretty cold spell for a while so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Hiking distance: about 2.8 miles.
After our hike, we headed down to play on the lake’s frozen surface. Some people were playing hockey, there were a few dogs, and everyone was having a great time. It sure was weird to walk where we’ve been canoeing before.
Lake Griffy
Sarah
Ice skate designs
Stick
Me
Hill
Docks
Dock
Dangling my feet in the water
Lake Griffy. The black specks on the surface, in the distance, are people.
A few words about this camera: in short, it rocks. I noticed some vignetting on some of these shots that I wasn’t expecting. It seems to particularly flatter people, the lens has a crispness to it but simultaneously just enough softness to make portraits look really great. So far, guessing the exposure is working surprisingly well — in fact, the prints look better than these scans, which were done rather poorly at CVS. At any rate, not bad for a camera from the 60s, for $30 on eBay, including shipping.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I agree – these are some nice shots for an older camera. I can sympathize with your plight of bad scanning from the drugstore photo labs. They’re cheaper but do a bad job usually. Still, it looks like everyone had a lot of fun despite the ridiculous conditions (hiking, in snow, in winter? Nuts, I tell ya!).
Hey, I meant to ask you – what format of slide film were you using? I know that you said that you cross-processed it, but did you use C-41 process slide film and just have it printed like a normal picture, or did you actually get a different process slide film and have it done (such as E6 process film)?
January 30th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
As far as I know there’s no such thing as a C41 process slide film. The cross-processed shots I’ve done all used E6 film, processed as C41 and printed. I either have them scan the negatives, or I scan the prints or negatives myself. I get great results when I have my local camera shop do the scanning; decent when I do it; crummy when CVS does it, but that’s cheaper than the camera shop and allows me to be lazy about it, or get things processed at times when the camera shop is closed.