Last modified: November 25, 2004
What's up with these nasty copyright notices?
It
was a cold Friday evening, I was working on my senior project (a file system for
a DDS drive) which was due in two week's time. Or better, I was not working on
it and was rather thinking about how to waste my time.
At 10pm I made the decision that I would likely waste the night and the following day anyway, and so I grabbed my photo bag and other equipment and headed east. I knew it was a long trip. What I didn't think of was the fact that it was Friday night and that I had no food on board. However, I was well aware that I had only two rolls of slide film, four sheets of color 4*5 and six sheets of b/w 4*5 film. At this time there was no place to get new supplies though. It simply had to last.
I
headed to the lake through Yosemite, over the Tioga pass. What I didn't think of
was the possibility that this pass would still be closed. Well, it was. Once at
the west entrance I was greeted by a sign telling me the bad news. So I had to
drive around Yosemite, a detour of about 200 miles from my current position.
I arrived at the lake just before dawn. I haven't eaten in 12 hours, but the view was more than a fair trade. Just around sunrise I was running around taking pictures with both my EOS gear as well as the borrowed 4*5 camera.
Given
the fact that I was very tired, it was little of a surprise what kind of
mistakes I made. Simply put, the pictures of that trip were quite a loss,
because I was metering the exposure for the 4*5 with my 1N. The ISO in the 4*5
was 100 or 320, that in the 1N was 50... You can imagine what happened. At any
rate, the sunrise was spectacular. Around 6am I saw more and more people with
cameras, some of them mad for missing the real action. With the crowd at the
lake growing, I left and headed for the nearest food store. The only problem was
that there was none, at least not an open one. So I headed south to Bishop,
which is quite a distance. Before that I drove towards the Tioga pass; the
green-ness of the nature there was very non-Californian, which made me very
happy.
After
lunch in Bishop (where I bought enough food for the rest of the day), and a 3-hr
nap in a nearby forest, I headed back to the lake for the sunset. At that time a
huge number of photographers has already taken the lake hostage. It was
interesting to watch some people equipped with a $3000 camera and a $300 zoom
lens. However, I was not the only large format shooter. A guy from San Diego,
who has traveled all around the world already, was shooting in 4*5 and 6*7
formats. He stayed overnight to capture the sunrise the other morning. Unlike
me, he had huge supplies of film for this camera - I had run out of film just
around sunset, even though being very economical throughout the day.
After
sunset, I left heading home. With my usual driving style I arrived at Stanford
at 1am. My neighbors were quite surprised to see me back that quickly. They were
less surprised when I immediately crashed in my bed and slept for some 12 hours
the next day.