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.