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.