This post was written a few days back while I was doing a 3 nights of camping in my small van.
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Been camping in the Rocky Mountains the last few days, no WIFI here (thank goodness) but wrote this up to post later.
The trip has been nice so far, camping free the first 2 nights, first night at a rest stop in Rocky Mountain House (Alberta town) and the second on the open plains of Preacher Point near the Banff National Park border.
In Calgary I might be buying a Reis Tripod with head if I can convince the seller to give me a good price, he sort of over values his goods, expecting almost new prices. This same seller (Kevin) also has a beautiful 24x24 ULF Chamonix camera with wet plate back. This would be a almost perfect compliment to my 16x20 Chamonix for the Canada wide wet plate place “Oh Canada”. I made an offer for the camera, tripod and various other gear (wet plate (ice fishing) tent) and 3 ultra large white trays.
Been dreaming of Dad again, in one dream several days ago the doctors were preforming medical experiments on him, he lay on a bed with open round pools of fluid showing where his stomach was (scary). Last night had all kinds of weird non dad dreams. I am certainly a dreamer, I think I dream almost every night, usually multiple times.
One nice real life adventure this trip is that I shot Alfred Steiglitz style “Equivalents” (cloud sky shots) with the Graflex Super D. Mr Steiglitz in his day (1920s?) shot his cloud sky shots with a Graflex D (I think). I love been able to follow in the traditions of master photographers 100+ years later, using almost the same tools. Also used one of my old style bag film holders, which can carry an amazing 12 films. This camera is lots of fun to shoot, one of the modern lens I have for it a 150mm with press shutter (main 4x5 lens) allows me to shoot very close at f5.6 with an extreme shallow depth of field. I shot some flowers blowing in the wind pic with that set up, 1/1000 at f5.6 with the modern lens of flowers. What is amazing to me is that this ancient Graflex could attain 1//1000 of a second shutter speed using its ancient spring wound up mechanism.
Time to get back on the road again, Banff awaits.
