One of the strange gifts of black and white photography is that no one ever asks, "Is that how it really looked?"

With colour—especially digital—this question is always lurking. The saturation, the warmth of the light, the shadows, the contrast: every part of a digital image can be pushed and pulled. You can make a grey morning glow like a golden hour. You can turn a dull sky blue. You can erase blemishes, adjust curves, and clone out anything you don’t like. And people know this. That’s the problem. We’ve trained ourselves to question what we see. Is it real, or is it PhotoShop?

Below my house are grasslands I have walked for more than 25 years. Several years ago, the City built a mountain bike park through the sea, chasing the nature of it permanently.

I found this sagebrush lily on my last stroll, growing almost defiantly in the middle of one the busy downhill runs. I have no idea how long it will last in such a precarious place, but wildflowers have short lives anyways…

It’s the time of year around Kamloops when one of my favourite wildflowers makes its annual appearance — sagebrush lilies. They are a flower of the grasslands, and are commonly found, you guessed it — around sagebrush. They last just a few weeks and they are gone, and while they are out, walking through the grasslands is just a tad more special ,,,

A few weeks ago I found a cardboard envelope in a box of stuff. It was the kind of sturdy envelope that I used to send 4x5 colour film to the lab for processing. This one had “2 sheets Ektar 100, January 2015” written on the outside, but nothing else… I had no idea what was on the film inside, or why I never sent them off to be developed.

I had read somewhere that it is possible to develop C41 colour negative film in B&W film chemistry, so I gave it a go, and loads the two sheets of Ektar into my Unicolor drum. I took a wild guess and developed the film as if it were Ilford Delta 100 — 9 minutes in stock Xtol in the drum processor at 70F, with normal fixing. I was amazed at what popped out. The film still had the characteristic orange tint in the base, but there was a decent looking B&W image in there.

Sometimes you take a pic and are at loss to explain it. That was the case here … Recently, I asked Chat GPT the following in relation to the pic, “What story do you think it tells?” Here is my AI friend’s verbatim reply: