31st March

Seascape, Bolungarvik, Iceland 

Looking forward to getting some nice serial shots in black and white that I can make into diptychs and triptychs before doing what I laughably call “hand coloring in Photoshop” (actually “colorizing”). You can see some examples of this type of work on my website www.paulrosephotography.com. Click on ‘Galleries’, ‘Color’, then ‘Iceland Panoramas’ or ‘Geneva Creek’. Both of those galleries consist of colorized images although the Iceland shots are square but cobbled together to make panoramics. You can see an example above and another one below. 

I recently sold my panoramic camera on E-Bay because I had not used it for quite a spell. Now that it’s sold I find a craving for full panoramic images to complement my diptychs. Typical!! That seems to be the way with photography and probably holds true for many other aspects of life. What one has, one does not use; what one needs, one does not have and what one does not need one invariably has and can be sold on E-Bay in order to convert it instantaneously into something one desperately needs. Did that make sense?

Cliffs, Bolungarvik, Iceland

30th March

It seems that, after 2 days from hell, the food poisoning is wearing off and Carol and I are (almost) back to our usual easy going, vibrant selves.

I had some interesting e-mail banter with John Sheets – a participant on the 2010 Iceland trip. Seems that I persuaded John to buy an XXL Rab Latok Alpine shell jacket after he read that I was taking one to Scotland. Come on Rab, that must be worth something! If Johns’ shell turns out to be too big for him we can swap because mine has no wiggle room. The people he is buying from will let him take it to Iceland for a few weeks and return it if it does not work out for him, which is a very cool deal. How come I didn’t get a deal like that? John is a more strapping lad than I am so I doubt the swap will actually take place. I must admit to feeling the pressure though. What if the jacket leaks like a rusty oil tanker and it’s all my fault!

Been checking out some hiking routes from walkhighlands.co.uk. Wow, what a great website. All the routes are marked for degree of difficulty. Of course, they have no idea how weak and pathetic I have become so their easy hikes are my “next to impossible” ones. Maps and descriptions of the routes can be printed out which is a big plus. They also have great links to other information sites as well as the John Muir Trust (of which I have proudly become a life member). I am looking forward to walking some JMT land in order to get my moneys worth. Ha.

I have not yet worked out which hikes I will do or in what order. That will depend to a great extent on the weather. Obviously high on the list will be Sandwood Bay, a spectacular stretch of remote sand. The only access, I am thrilled to say, is by walking 4.5 miles in and 4.5 miles out and I have no doubt that the outward will seem a lot longer than the inward. Given that I am a natural dawdler and prone to stopping frequently for piccies, I estimate that it will a verrry long day. Also high on the list will be the 8 mile Canisp hike if for no other reason than I well remember doing this in knee deep snow about 35 years ago. I also remember with awe the huge feldspar crystals that weather out of the granite on this particular mountain. I am sure that in between these two hikes I will need some sort of physical therapy or maybe just a few tiny hikes (hikelets?) to give me time to recover.

29th March

I am lucky enough to have married a woman who is glad to get me out of the house for a week or so. I quickly learned that Carol has no real interest in photography and certainly none where setting up a 4x5 camera is concerned. This has worked out well. I get to have my “me” time and she gets to have time with her girl friends (at least that is what she tells me). I noticed that being accompanied by Carol on a 4x5 photography day placed severe restrictions on my ability to be creative. While she would insist that reading a book while waiting for me to set up and sometimes pull down the camera without taking a photograph, was perfectly OK, I would feel pressured into working quickly, trying to get it over with. Now I know that I need to be alone, or with like minded souls when I am out in the field. I guess that’s the whole point of being a loner and I am perfectly sanguine about it.

When I go on my ever more infrequent self-guided tours I feel like I am on a prolonged trip to some giant quarry to collect mineral specimens. I never know what I will end up with but there is always the hope that I will stumble across a few gems in the process.

This particular trip will last about one week and, in my jaundiced view is considered mostly pleasure. The hard work really starts when I get back home. Film will need to be developed and scanned. Digital color images will require prepping. Black and whites will be edited, culled and printed out on my inkjet printer and then further edited for selection of negatives to take to the darkroom. I expect the whole post-trip workload to take 2-3 months (that sounds about right). Any pictures you see posted to the blog in the early days will, of necessity be unretouched, “in the raw” as it were and downloaded directly from my digital camera. I do not take a laptop or iPad loaded with Lightroom into the field. Maybe next year.

28th March

OK let's start today with the news you all want to know. Carol and I have a bout of food poisoning! I am so glad there is plenty of time to recover. Now onto something completely different.

The camera equipment I will be taking to Scotland is nothing new – it’s the same gear I took to Iceland in 2011 while on the Schwab tour. The accent is on portability, so sadly my 4x5 Toyo field will be left at home. Several years ago I had a bad experience with Fuji Quickload 4x5 film. The film was fogged when passing through the carry on airport x-ray system and I was left with a bunch of plates with metal bar imprints on them (the metal bar being the retaining clip at the sealed end of the quickload packet). When I brought this up with Fuji they denied any culpability (perfectly reasonable) and kindly provided me with replacement film but I was left with a partially ruined visit to Scotland. A few of the plates were salvageable because the x-rayed metal bar ‘shadow’ fell close to the edge of the image so it was not a complete disaster. Of course, it rained torrentially for the whole time I was there which did not help. Mum was not best pleased either!

Oh, I digressed. I will be taking my lovely little Panasonic Lumix GF1 digital camera with two zoom lenses (the 14-45mm and the 45-200mm) for color work and my Bronica SQB with two lenses for black and white film work. I love the Lumix because it is so tiny (there’s that packability thing again) and such good quality. I first found out about the Lumix while in Iceland on the Schwab trip. I reckoned that if it was good enough for some of those seasoned pro's then it would be good enough for me. The Bronica is one of the smallest medium format cameras with readily available interchangeable lenses and I tend to shoot a lot with the standard lens so the 80mm and one other (in this case a 50mm wide angle) are all I need. To digress once again, I am thinking of upping the ante to an 8x10 plate camera on my return. Yikes! I like the idea of cutting down the negatives – or cropping them – to 5x10 and contact printing them in platinum/palladium. Ah well, dreams are made of things such as this. Of course, the big boy would be used in and around home or maybe even to do some wet plate collodion. I have done courses on Pt/Pd with Dan Burkholder and on WPC with Quinn Jacobsen here in Denver - both great courses and highly recommended. 

Back to equipment. For those of you who may be technically minded I will have my OSN carbon fibre tripod with Induro DM23 ball head, a Sekonic L508 lightmeter and a bunch of accessories including several ND filters so that I can play with getting some low light shots. I will shoot Ilford FP4+ and develop it in PMK Pyro as usual. There, enough of the really boring stuff. Maybe future blog entries can talk about philosophy, art and all those other hairy fairy things that you are craving.

Later on the 27th March

I tried to do a video of my 4 layer system (in fact I did do a video!) but the video was too big to upload. Something else I have to fathom out before I leave. Oh well, here it is in pictures from top to bottom. At top I am in all four layers with my outer Rab Latok Alpine XL looking a bit stretched. For those of you who are Rab XL I would suggest moving up 1 size. The coat is made of e-vent and is reputed to repel all the nasty type of weather that Scotland is likely to throw at the unsuspecting traveler. The coat has a great, cinch-cordable hood as you can see. It's almost like looking out the window of a warm house at the harsh world outside. I like the way the hood can be securely tied back with an inside velcro-ed tab. The waist also has cinch cords to keep the wind out. The sleeves are velcro-ed and there are two huge front pockets but no vent slits (apparently the coat does not need them). This is a light jacket with heavy duty performance - er, at least that is what Rab tells me. We shall see.

Layer 2 (or 3 if you are working from the inside) is a Rab down Microlight jacket that folds away into its own chest pocket - cool! Great for packing and really warm. I am really going for lightweight gear these days and this is a minimalist yet functional piece of apparel.

Layer 3 (or 2) is an Icebreaker Merino wool sweater of 260 weight. It is relatively light (although one of Icebreakers heavier items), good looking (unlike me!) and apparently wicks away horrid smells. Sounds like I will be able to wear it all week without people trying to avoid me.

Last but not least is my 'next to the skin' Arcteryx thermal layer with moisture wicking technology. There are lots of similar items on the market and I will also be taking a similar garment by Spyder. The quality of such garments is guaranteed as long they are made by the better companies so my advice is not to go cheap. 

I took several more photos of me progressively stripping off layer after layer but I am trying to avoid censorship issues so have reluctantly decided to forego posting them. Lucky for you!

27th March 2012

About 2 weeks to go to the trip and everything is in place. I am planning for the worst weather but I am obviously hoping for the best. Here is a review of the gear I will be taking:

Rab Latok Alpine e-vent shell

Rab Microlight down jacket (the one without the hood)

Icebreaker Merino wool 260 weight sweater

Arcteryx base layer AR-40

Patagonia trousers

Hot Chillies thermal long johns

Black Diamond Contour Elliptical aluminium trekking poles

Now let me start by saying that I really don’t care who the manufacturer of a garment is (perhaps I should). What I care about is the suitability of the garment(s) for the intended purpose. Now that I am getting older and suffer from less than perfect hips and lower back I need items that are lightweight as well as really good at what they do. They should pack small because I carry camera gear as well as all weather clothing and I can only lug around a camera backpack of limited volume (I use a LowePro).

For me, the ideal system is one of layers so that I can adapt the setup to just about any conditions. While I happen to be English I have lived in Colorado for the last 20 years. Colorado has dry air and the winters can be extremely cold and snowy with strong winds. I do a lot of my photography in England, Scotland and Iceland (how come I seem to like places like these) where the winters are cold but the air is moist and the winds are strong. The wind chill factor is greater in areas with moist air or it certainly feels that way. Of course, as I get older the cold bites ever more deeply into my weakening torso so the clothing really does get to be a topic of great interest and concern.

I recently tried out the 4 layer system of Arcteryx base layer, Icebreaker sweater, Rab down jacket and Rab shell on a not so cold (28F), snowy, breezy day in Colorado. The whole setup was warm – too warm when I started to walk uphill but I never worked hard enough to really sweat so the wickability of these garments remained untested at that point. The real test will probably occur on my trip to Assynt and Cape Wrath. I will be walking the windy coastlines and the even windier and maybe snow capped mountains of Assynt. My walks will vary from 2 miles to 10 miles – easy stuff for the hardy British hill walker.  I have surmised that staying dry and comfortable for 3 to 4 miles would likely allow me to stay dry for 8 miles or more in similar conditions. I'll post a photo of me looking stupid in my gear (maybe tomorrow?).