split

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. June 22, 2008.

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I left my camera at work Thursday after shooting the Jailbreaks launch. I didn't notice until yesterday, when I wanted to shoot the aftermath of the two-minute hailstorm...of course, I didn't know if the shots would be for purely aesthetic or insurance purposes. But the hailstorm was minor and the car intact.

Since Aqua is closed Sunday/Monday, that meant no camera until Tuesday. But then I remembered the old camera. From the same line but several generations back.

And so, having planned a walk in the forest and packed a change of clothes, I had only to charge the batteries and go. Except the walk was hot and buggy and the camera...didn't want to cooperate.

I won't go into technical details - mostly because I can't (heh.) - but the camera balked when I tried to take photos that my usual camera would capture effortlessly.

And by balking, I mean no 'green rectangle of sharpness.' Which meant that I had to shift the distance the camera was from the subject, shift what I was trying to focus on, and shift on my haunches.

Simply put, it was too hot & buggy and I'm too old to endlessly shift on my haunches.

So I started muttering and shouting at M, who is too old to stay put and watch me shoot. So he started scouting ahead, which meant that whenever I got off my haunches and wiped the sweat off my forehead, he had a five or six specimens at intervals along the path for me to shoot.

It may be perverse, but half the pleasure of shooting is the images you go home with and half is finding things to make images out of.

While I don't mind M finding one or two things, a half hour into concentrated shooting, I felt like a seeing-eye-shooter - no exploring, no looking down the path and breathing in the green, just march to one specimen, squat, march to another, squat...

Hence the shouting. So M started pausing on the path, oh-so-subtly, near mushrooms he was now afraid to point out.

Luckily, what with the recent gouts of sun and rain, there were plenty of mushrooms and we soon got into a less frustrating rhythm...and three hours disappeared.

(I can't wait until Aa is old enough to go on endless rambles with us...)