First day entry

I am somewhat different from all other photographers working in the Himalayas in that I use the large format 8x10" camera. Most people may not be familiar with that terminology, large format 8x10" camera, but if you can visualize the kind of cameras used in the civil war in the 1860's, yes, the same ones that look like an accordion with a lens attached, with the photographer disappearing under a cloth to focus the thing, you have the camera in mind. You may be asking yourself why would I bother with such ancient and arcane technology. The answer is that this type camera gives a very high resolution image, very clear and highly detailed. Many people are familiar with the photography of American Master photographer Ansel Adams: he used this same type camera to capture the beautiful images he made in Yosemite and the American West. Mr. Adams was an original inspiration of mine but after discovering his work I found that most of the photographers I really liked, Edward Weston, Edouard Baldus, Maxime Du Camp,have all used this type of camera.
I went to the Himalayas in 1976 with my Nikon camera and shot with 35mm Kodachrome film. Although I made pictures that impressed friends and surprised even me(!) I felt that the landscape was really too grand to be expressed in the diminutive 35mm format! large format style. I thought that it was crazy to try to compress a 12,000' view into a single inch of film space, as in the 35mm system. I remember saying to myself that I would've traded all my 35mm slides for one black and white photo in the style of Adams or any of the other photographers I had admired who used the large format.
I finally started to photograph in the Everest Region with the big camera in 1998. Since then I've won a couple of grants, had a show at the Hickory Museum of Art, was the subject of a large article in the Charlotte Observer(2/27/07), was on Mike Collins radio show, Charlotte Talks and his tv show, Charlotte Now.

I have started this blog to illustrate the daily life of a photographer in serious pursuit of the making of a comprehensive body of photographic work. Ostensibly, my subject is the world's tallest mountain, called in the West, Mt Everest, but as I've learned, known in the countries where it's located, Nepal and Tibet, as Sagarmatha and Qomolungma, respectively, more about that later.

Tomorrow I will start to file the daily logs of my trip to the Everest region in March and April of this year and will illustrate it with some AVI's and some of the photos I made.

First Day Entry

20 March 2008
The ‘Running Down A Dream Tour’

6:55pm As the bus is ready to pull away from the curb on the side of the Port Authority Terminal on 42nd St in New York City heading to JFK Airport, I can see my Brother Jim driving away in my car after dropping me at the bus stop.
Traffic is NYC typical : moving at a snail’s pace and everyone displaying a cut-throat driving ethic I had perfected when I lived here but have long since forgotten about.
This had been a long day or so. My original plan had been to leave Charlotte Wednesday at around 6pm get to my brothers in NJ in the morning then go into the city by about 2pm. I only had two things to do Wednesday – make two lensboards out of Plexiglass and pick up some posters that were being reprinted – I say reprinted because they had been printed the previous Thursday but the entire run, 1500 copies, on the wrong paper stock. They had been promised to me by noon but as it was being explained to me now, I’m just a little fish in the printing scheme of things and a big fish had bumped my job! So my job would go onto the press at midnite and I could pick up my 200 copies at about 3am! I had pretty much packed but there were always little odds and ends surfacing I wanted to bring. It took a couple of hours to make the lensboards, then cleanup the house, empty the fridge, etc. I got the call from the printer posters would be ready at 3:30. I got going. The posters looked good and I had them in the car by 3:45 and I was on the road a few moments later. I was looking at a 10 hour drive under the best of conditions, and conditions were rarely the best. I hadn’t slept at all so after an hour or so I stopped and slept 45 min, then I was on my way for real. I made good time by staying pegged on 68mph, stopped and bought a pair of hiking boots in Pennsylvania that were reduced from $115 to $68, good boots, not exactly my size but pretty close and usable. Arrived at my Brother Randy’s house at little after 3:30pm and repacked the bags for the last time with the ‘essential’ 178lbs of stuff – the posters are heavy. On the way Jim and I plan our rendevous and stay in touch by cellphone til I see him on the street in the city.
We arrive at the airport at 8:20. I run in with my three big bags and a carry-on in hand. All very cumbersome and heavy – I later weighed them and found the three big ones to weigh almost exactly 150 lbs!! But they were distributed slightly irregularly – the small bag a mere 28lbs! That’s a lot to carry any distance, but I’m desperate to catch the 9pm flight, so I do my best to shuffle rapidly into the terminal .
My Brother told me that he had heard on the radio that because of high winds all flights at JFK had been delayed one hour – that wasn’t true. The counter personnel for my flight had already packed up and left the area – I had missed the mandatory 90 minute advance check-in( guess they weren’t kidding about that!!!) There was a woman who was in the same predicament and she was being as ugly as a mad New Yorker could be to anyone who would listen, saying that although the plane wasn’t scheduled to leave for another 40 min, they still wouldn’t let us board. There were some scary moments, but finally someone from the airline said we could fly on the same flight the next night.
I gave the counter guys an Everest poster I had taken out of one of my bags when we tried to rebalance my weights. I wrote on it “Great service, thanks, Jeff!” I wasn’t sure if that was sarcasm or what but they loved it and promised to put it up in their office. I knew as I was writing it their boss wouldn’t be able to perceive the sarcasm. The boss gave me his card and said if I had any trouble the next day he’d be glad to help – and, in fact I did call on him and he put on pne of my bags for free, a $100 value at the weight. Hopefully, they won’t charge me on the other side.
During the transactions I glanced at my passport and noticed to my horror it was scheduled to expire on 21 April ’08! So I spent the day on Friday jumping thru hoops to do the impossible: renew my passport in a single day! I finally left the passport office at 4:30 Friday afternoon, I even had to call Amy and have her forge an urgent request on her business letterhead to permit me to renew the passport and fax it to me - the guards at the street door finally realized I deserved help and told me about that ruse after I stood before them and offered $100 cash to any person on line who was willing to sell me his confirmed appointment!
If it were n’t for the fact that this was Good Friday and there was about 20% the amount of the traffic as the night before, I may again not have made it to the plane in time.

21 March 2008 Friday

So, on Friday the 21st of March 2008, I took off out of JFK once more to my second country,
Nepal, and the mountains, the Himalayas. We touched off at 9pm, stopped Brussels for two
hours then landed again in Delhi at 3pm Saturday, New York time. Elapsed time, 18hrs – in air time, 16hrs. The time in Delhi was midnight Saturday.
Everywhere in the Delhi Airport there are signs saying ‘Get Set For A New Tomorrow’ in bold 4” font but right under it in much smaller 1.5” font, as if as explanation of an imaginary asterisk, are the words, ‘Till Then Inconvenience Is Regretted” sic. So very Indian! Even the dropping of the article before the word inconvenience, as if it’s somehow less inconvenient, less of an inconvenience because it isn’t given the importance of ‘The Inconvenience.” Some of the signs say, in the large font, “A World Class Airport Awaits You”. Almost like an explanation for everything in India itself. Then reflecting, I wondered if it didn’t sound so much like me, always explaining off the present as an investment in the future. I need to move up to the future, India has always been the definition of the frustrating and ineffectual.
On the flight into Nepal we could see some mountains to the West of the Everest Group, one of them the Annapurna Group – even to my eyes, which have seen so many mountains, I found them surprisingly impressive. The form and the fluting on the flanks, the shadows and the general modeling was intensely beautiful(later, thru photos I realize I was looking at Dhalughiri), then the Annapurna group. I made some funky low res shots with the digital camera.