Black and white can feel like the wrong choice when the forest is burning with autumn color. Yet that is exactly when it exposes how well you understand tone, structure, and the way trees and branches hold a frame.
Coming to you from Steve O'Nions, this thoughtful video follows a quiet morning in peak color where O'Nions refuses to switch to color film and stays with black and white. He returns to a familiar clearing with a Bronica medium format camera and Ilford Delta 100, repeating compositions he first explored with 8x10 to build a set of square images that belong together. You watch him meter carefully off the side of a main tree, accept 15-second exposures at f/16, and ignore the temptation to brighten everything into a thin, crunchy negative. His priority is open tones and detail in the bark and shadows, even if the background softens a little and the scene feels slower and more deliberate.
As the session develops, O'Nions starts wrestling with how lens choice reshapes a composition more than the subject itself. He tries to recreate a favorite frame built around a central stump and two flanking trunks, but branches block his old viewpoint and the framing will not quite line up. He switches to a Bronica 40mm Zenzanon lens, roughly a very wide view, and finds the background shrinking, the cut stump dominating, and the balance falling apart even though the elements are the same. Later, he mounts a short telephoto Bronica 150mm lens from farther back and the scene suddenly clicks, with stumps pulled closer together and the background sitting in a stronger relationship to the main trunk. You see in real-time how focal length, camera height, and a waist-level finder that keeps the camera level help keep trees straight instead of converging into awkward angles.
The video also leans into the idea that not every frame from a roll matters equally, and that is where a lot of the value sits. O'Nions openly calls one ultra-wide composition the weakest of the day, pointing out how the central tree goes nowhere and the stumps on one side feel random even though there is plenty of technical detail. Later, he works from the opposite side of the big tree, keeping the camera low and choosing f/16 for depth of field after finding f/11 left the foreground too soft. He talks through why the composition might work better under different light, when the background recedes a bit more and gives the dominant trunk more space, which helps you think less about instant results and more about notes for a return visit. There is also a useful comparison between his Bronica’s built-in long shutter speeds and a Hasselblad system, where having timed 16-second exposures means you are not stuck holding a cable release in bulb mode in the rain.
By the time the light lifts, O'Nions shifts focus toward the kind of details that often get ignored on a first visit. He starts to work on smaller stumps and broken branches, using the standard lens around f/22 for 8-to-16-second exposures once the deep shadows separate. The scene is no longer about grand trunks but about texture and shape, and he hints that to go closer he will need extension tubes and possibly a longer Bronica 250mm lens on a future trip. He explains that this forest is now a long-term project, with square black and white images over about 12 months that combine big structural shots with tight macro details instead of a random set of one off frames. The video does not just show polished keepers but also contact sheet style results from the whole roll, so you can see which ideas he thinks justify another early start and which ones quietly fall away. Check out the video above for the full rundown from O'Nions.
No comments yet