Keefer Photography

Hand-colored black and white photograph, 8 by 10 inches. No. 0202.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the second in my new series of hand-colored black and white photographs made in the Oregon forest at dusk or at night. They are lit by a single on-camera flash, which gives an unusual but pleasantly harsh look to the scene.

The photograph was made with Tri-X film on my Pentax LX with an SMC-M 28mm/2.8 lens and the Pentax 280T flash.

One of the problems of using an old manual camera for this sort of work is that you don’t have autofocus with a focus assist light, as you would on a more modern camera. Instead you set the lens to f/8, guess the distance, set the focus by feel in the dark and pop the shutter.