The History of Photography: 1991

Good Photography is Hard Work: Or so I'm told. My buddies, they flog themselves out of bed at 4AM to get to the mountains for first light and lug around metal 4X5 cameras that make the Mamiya 7 seem light and spotmeter their scenes to achieve optimal black & white results. Me, well, it's a nice day out and if I want to lie down in the grass and sheep toots and doze for a while under the pleasures of an English summer day then I hope you won't wake me up. Nikon FE, 20mm, Kodachrome 64.

Paul Salamon, with whom I bought all those lenses back in 1976, wins trip to Britain on British Airways in wake of terrorism and Gulf War but takes wife instead of me, the bum. While there, he shoots 120 negative film in the Rolleiflex 2.8 he got when his grandfather died. These get printed borderless in a 5 X 5 size and are impressive, prints that are everything the weenie 3.5 square bordered prints I remember are not. I look at my Rolleicord with renewed interest. I try to talk Paul into giving me the 'flex because it's clearly too cool for him but he unreasonably refuses. Karla and I go to Britain anyway. Carry FE 20, 28, 55, 105, 300, shoot a lot of Kodachrome. Karla not feeling great, we attribute it initially to beer, greasy food and my driving. She fails to improve. Discover she is pregnant, on the day I took the picture above, actually. She comes home early. I hang out a for a while with cousins, then come home too. Poor Karla, not feeling great to begin with, has been watching tv including updates on Jeffrey Dahmers and the various people he's, um, had for dinner, if you get my drift, not the best viewing for a queasy expectant mother.