Kodak Gold
Polish Hike
Tatras, Zakopane, August 2025
August 2025. Zakopane. Four days hiking in the Tatras with my girlfriend, from the Polish border to the high-altitude lakes. I had a roll of Kodak Gold in the Rollei 35. Nothing else needed when the mountain is there.
Kodak Gold in the mountains, in full summer, produces impossible greens. Not the synthetic greens of digital processing: dense, warm greens, almost brown in places, with visible grain that anchors them in reality. In the Tatras in August, under a sky alternating between storm and sun, this film was exactly right.
We walked six hours a day for four days. Crête Verte is the first view of the massif from the morning trail, before the clouds rose. L'Émeraude is a high-altitude lake whose color is so saturated that the first photograph looks fake. It isn't. The Tatra lakes are green.
The series built itself around a vertical progression: from wooded valleys to mineral ridges. Cathédrale Verte and La Vallée document the first hours, the forest climbing. Miroir Jumeau and L'Émeraude arrive at altitude, where the vegetation disappears and the water takes on colors you didn't expect. Équilibre Minéral is the last image before the descent.
What makes the Tatras particular is the brutality of the scenery change. In two hours of walking, you go from beech forest to bare granite. There's no transition, just a boundary. The camera is a good reason to stop in front of it.