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.