Great Salt Lake | FUJI X WEEKLY

Antelope Island State Park – Two Cameras, Two Photographers

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Ritchie Roesch

Rainbow over Antelope Island. Photo by Ritchie Roesch with a Fujifilm X100V.

One of my favorite places in northern Utah is Antelope Island State Park. It’s such a strange land! Antelope Island, which sits in the Great Salt Lake, seems like a world away from the Salt Lake City metro area, even though it is located very close to the city. Wildlife abounds, including buffalo, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, big horn sheep and many other animals. At one time the bison herd on Antelope Island was the largest in America. There are a huge variety of birds that migrate across the area. The water is often calm, and the reflections can be incredible. There are sandy beaches. There are trails that curve across the rugged landscape. There is a unique beauty to Antelope Island that draws me back. It’s one of my favorite places to photograph!

Antelope Island is also disgusting! There’s a certain “rotten egg” smell that can be found near the shores. There are tons and tons of bugs, including biting no-see-ums, brine flies (that cover the shore like a thick cloud), mosquitoes, tons of spiders (venomous and non-venomous), among other things. It’s pretty common to see dead birds. There’s plenty to love and hate about this place. I try to look beyond the gross to see the beauty. It is indeed an odd place, and one has to purposefully look beyond the negative aspects to truly appreciate it. I feel like it is a secret treasure that is easily overlooked.

My wife, Amanda, and I visited Antelope Island earlier this week. I brought my Fujifilm X100V, while she had her X-T20 with a Fujinon 10-24mm f/4 lens attached to it. For my pictures, I used my Kodak Tri-X 400 film simulation recipe for black-and-white and my Fujicolor Reala 100 film simulation recipe for color. I reprocessed in-camera a couple of the rainbow pictures using Velvia. Amanda had PRO Neg. Hi loaded into her camera, but she reprocessed most of her pictures using either Acros or Velvia.

Even though we used different cameras with different generation sensors, I thought that our pictures worked well together. I wanted to share them with you as a set. I found it interesting that for some images our vision was nearly identical, and for others we captured our pictures differently. Amanda did a great job, and it was a fun experience to go out and photograph with her. Antelope Island once again proved to be a great location for photography. Enjoy!

B&W