By the time I got up four out of five people in the house were running fevers, and I was one of them. My youngest daughter was the only hold-out, and after a minimal amount of paper-scissors-rock and drawing straws, I wound up taking her out of the house to keep her from iggling her siblings to distraction. (That did happen later, so it was a valid concern.)
We went to Waipi`o Valley. The air was pretty opaque from the gasses being pumped out by the volcanoes, so this was as close to a sweeping landscape as I came. I was also sick and exhausted, and didn't drag the camera more than fifty feet from my Jeep.
My one claim to success was going to be a driftwood arrangement I set up to photograph with my Bender (which is pictured above). I found the perfect piece of wood with gorgeous texture and detail. I half-buried it in the black sand, nestled among a bunch of water-rounded lava rocks. Perfect! I composed, focused, locked, pulled out a film holder, metered, set the lens, and exposed. Click!
Meanwhile my daughter had found a really beautiful piece of spalted driftwood, some ironwood seed pods, and some lava rock of her own, and had set up what I have to admit is a much better arrangement. I'd only shot one side of my film holder, so I set up to shoot her arrangement using the other sheet.
It was after I'd tripped the shutter that I realized I'd grabbed the wrong film holder. Instead of TMax 100 (a black and white film) I'd grabbed my last two sheets of Kodak Portra VC 160 (a color negative film). Not only did I use my last two sheets of color film on a black and white subject, but I'd over-exposed by almost a stop. ARGH!
I re-shot hers with TMax, and it came out wonderfully well. So maybe there'll be enough detail in the Portra shots for me to process them in Gimp or Photoshop. Only time will tell. But needless to say I was disappointed.
When we reached the overlook at the valley rim, I tried to take a sweeping landscape shot. But by then I was just about passing out from exhaustion and general wrotten-ness. (My daughter was bouncing around like the energetic little ... you get the idea. Not what you need around you when you're sick.) The sweeping landscape shot was over-exposed, and didn't have enough detail in the highlights to print. Strike three.
As a parting shot I posed her for a portrait in front of some paperbark trees. Of all the photographs I took, it was by far the best. Maybe I need to stop doing landscape photography.
By the time we got home I was ready to collapse. But then there was lunch, kid-wrangling, mending my camera (which had a mounting stud for the back pull out while we were in the valley), dishes, etc. Egads I hate being sick. Because most of the time you really don't get to just stop and get well.
Glad the pictures came out, though.
Tom
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