Trip Thoughts

Am  doing a late night darkroom session tonight, printing more show photographs. I keep thinking of my Thai trips this year. I want to take a 3 week trip (maybe April or September) and a 5 week trip (November/December), to start work on my solo effort/solo funded "Mae Sot Garbage Dump Portraits", I also want to make some trips to the refugee camps in the area of Mae Sot, to see if I can gain access to photograph there as well.

As I work in the darkroom developing 4x5 portraits made with the Linhof (beautiful sharp images even at 16x20), I keep thinking "How can I not take a 4x5 camera with me? Will I not be missing out on the chance to make some great large format portraits?".

A few weeks back I was thinking of only taking 2-35mm Leicas with 2 or 3 lens, but now I am wondering if it is not better to take 1 35mm Leica with 1 or 2 lens and the Linhof with 1 or 2 lens. I need to take 2 Leica lens because last year I did a trip with one lens and dropped and damaged the thing soon after arriving which meant I could not shoot any 35mm (the lens that I am now getting repaired from the earlier blog). If I take 2 lens I lessen the chance of being screwed again, if one lens goes down I still have the other  (Leica bodies are pretty robust, so hopefully no problems with 1 body).

I am uncertain how to proceed. If I did do the Linhof I might just take the absolute minimum, maybe 1 lens the lightest carbon fiber tripod that will work and 2 or 3 Graphmatic backs instead of the heavy plastic 4x5 holders.