New Hope

I went back and edited some of the photos I'd posted from Saturday to get rid of the strong blue cast in all of the snow pictures. While I was there I ran across that B&W 4x5 shot I did of the hibiscus flower. I felt a pang of sadness when I saw it because only a week after I took the picture the plant's owner wound up "trimming" the 7' high bushes down to about 12" of stick poking out of the ground. The flowers are gone, and I probably won't be able to photograph them again for at least another year, if they even survive the treatment they received.

So I guess this last round of depression was fed by all these changes happening, none of which were good. The flowers were gone, the weather was gone, weekends were melting away into "ought to"s instead of "want to"s, and this awful spiral just couldn't seem to slow down, much less stop.

So Saturday was a real breakthrough. I threw caution to the wind in a very literal fashion and in addition to stretching myself as a KAPer and flying in a location that's notoriously difficult to fly in, I got some good pictures out of it, too.

So this spurred me to revisit The List. I've had a list of places where I wanted to do KAP as well as 4x5 ground photography, and each time I go to a place and get a chance to learn its quirks it either ratchets up to the top of the list of places to go and really photograph, or it winds up being taken off the list entirely because it becomes a regular haunt for me to go visit.

The great thing is, the list is long. There's still a lot I haven't seen here. And of several places I've seen, a great many of them are tricky or difficult to do photography in. Most of the time the list lives in a text file on my mail server. But this time I wrote it down at the end of my calendar on the page for January 1, 2009. I'll let it serve as a reminder when that day comes that there's still a lot of exploring left to do. I can't imagine even for an instant that when January rolls around my list will be empty. It's the promise of things to come.

Saturday gave me new hope in more ways than I can count. I'm determined now to try to fly in Waipi`o Valley again, as well as Pololu Valley. They're tough places to fly. I get that. But it can't be bad weather all the time. And when the weather is good, it's magic.

Tom