Ashuelot River Park, Keene, NH

Another cool and cloudy morning allowed me to walk to work again today, this time taking a route through the Ashuelot River Park here in Keene, NH. I decided to travel light today, sticking with a 50mm lens that I tried to shoot wide open as much as possible, just to get used to the shallow depth of field and work on my focusing technique.

These photos were processed using the Portra 400 film emulation by Mastin Labs. After shooting a real roll of Portra 400 film for the first time a few years ago, I have been on a quest to replicate that look using my digital cameras and film emulations from VSCO, Nik Collection, and Replichrome. The Mastin Labs Portra 400 emulation is the first one that looks like the real thing, and it seems to work very well for the nature photos that I prefer. I am also finding that the Mastin emulations are very easy to use, and as a result I am doing far less fiddling with the digital files in Lightroom (also a good thing.)

I especially like the shift in the green hues that Portra provides. While the green hues are not true-to-life, I find them more pleasing than the actual greens which are more yellow and almost fluorescent.