Vacations: Purpose?

My wife bought our first serious camera in 1995: a Canon A2 with a 35-135mm lens. Over time more bodies and lenses came along, as well as several tripods. We even branched out in to large format photography with 4x5 gear. In the end we became fairly competent photographers, and had a purpose for our vacations: photography!

A typical day had us picking a location, throwing on way too much weight in gear, hiking around all day, and dragging our sorry looking selves back some time after dark with a couple of rolls of film shot, an exposed set of film holders, and big grins on our faces. But it didn't involve a lot of talking or visiting with other people, and to be painfully honest when other people were involved we did a lot less photography.

Recently, I got into kite aerial photography (KAP). When we decided to go to the mainland for vacation, my wife packed our camera gear and I packed my KAP gear. It was going to be great!

But after three weeks of vacation, I realized I only had one good flight and most of our pictures are of people. It wasn't for lack of wind or subjects. On the contrary the wind was remarkably good for that time of year, and my list of subjects was longer than my arm. But we had a choice: Are we here to do KAP? To do photography? Or are we here to visit with people we haven't seen in five years? The people won.

This phenomenon isn't limited to photographers and KAPers. It applies equally well to anyone else with a hobby that can be fed while on vacation. How many history buffs, sports buffs, fossil buffs, etc. ruin their family vacations by insisting they drag everyone to place X to see thing Y? And how many more wind up hating their family vacations because their family won't let them?

Let's face it: To an outsider, spending two hours crawling around under sage brush with a camera and a blacklight chasing scorpions is no less aberrant than insisting on visiting every civil war battlefield between Natches and Alexandria. So which is it going to be? Hobby? Or people?

So in the future I'm making a conscious choice: If it's going to be a KAP trip, I'll pack KAP gear with the understanding that I will be using it at the expense of doing other things. If it's going to be a photography trip, we're bringing both tripods, the 4x5 bag, the DSLR bag, etc. But if it's going to be a people trip the KAP and photo gear stay home.

But please bear with me if I'm still looking for wind sign and my wife is still composing shots.

Tom