Scarlet Letters

Jim and I were alone on Father's Day, so we drove up the Great River Road and had wine at the Pere Marquette Lodge. Jimmy got sleepy and I did some shooting. We love Pere Marquette; the views are so spectacular they can't really be captured with my photographic skill (yet) and it's a giant no-cell zone, which was poorly timed since the phone died in the middle of chatting with my dad. This was my second experiment with manual focus. I switched back and forth between manual and autofocus in the prom shoot, but that was different; I was using a tripod with humans who mostly stood still. This was handheld on a floating dock or by the side of the river on unstable rock. Turns out there's a few kinks in the system. One of them: It's really hard to adjust manual focus when the sun is shining directly in your eyes. I tried sunglasses, but then I could barely see at all. Here's a few of them. I will have to decide which go up on the shop ; I can't afford to put ...

There is something magical about the quality of light in the early morning when it is filtered between trees that weren't planted by any landscaper. I came late to hiking and backpacking; my parents took us on one or two camping trips when I was young, but Dad's idea of camping was (and still is) a four-star hotel on a golf course. I didn't really start camping until I was in college, a few rowdy trips when I didn't know what I was doing beyond the instructions in a book I found in the library. But my first husband was not particularly fond of the outdoors. He said his family's idea of camping was a sleeping bag and a fishing pole. If you didn't catch anything, you starve, and you can just sleep out under the stars and eat bugs like a man. No wonder I could never get him into the woods. The call of the wild. Eventually I took it upon myself to begin hiking and backpacking solo. And I fell in love with it. The light, you see. That strange ethereal qua...