It's been a long slog getting this enterprise started but I can finally give a starting date for my adventure. Right now I should be arriving stateside around April 1 (no April Fool's jokes please) and a week or so later I can hit the road. My schedule for this cycle is somewhat truncated due to the awkward starting time. I'd originally hoped to be on the road around the first of the year but all this crap with Russian residency and registration took far longer than I'd expected (actually took 7 months all together). But the final nail was driven last Friday and now I can start getting serious about the logistics of moving forward.
The other part of this process is planning a schedule ... a moving target given the constant slippage of my starting date. I've pretty much concluded that, for the first few years anyway, I can't be on the road all the time or even a majority of the time. It takes practice to establish the correct rhythms which are, not too surprising, very different from a normal day. For example, much of my photographic activity takes place around sunset and sunrise with the intervening hours devoted to night sky and low light capture and many hours of the pristine darkness reserved for color grading and editing my work product. You'd be surprised how much time is devoted to just organizing and protecting all the data your cameras generate. That leaves the daylight hours for scouting locations, eating, driving, housekeeping and sleeping. I suspect an inordinate amount of time gets devoted to finding truck stops/campgrounds for showering and food stores/gas stations for all the provisions needed to keep my enterprise going and healthy. I suspect there won't be enough hours in the day for all the things I need/want to do.
So my plan is to spend half the year on the road (this year only 3 months due to the late start) and half the year with my family in Russia. As Russian winters are extremely hard on my asthma, I'll be forced stateside from around November first to the end of April. This isn't as inconvenient as it first appears as I can use the time off to process more photos and create videos from my time lapse efforts plus plan for the next cycle (which isn't as easy is one might think ... it's taken literally months to get ready for this truncated three month cycle).
Provisioning a 6-month Road Trip
Amazon and B&H Photo/Video must be tired of my incessant visits to their websites where I constantly groom the list of needs/wants for this business. There are lenses/filters/tripods and a host of other camera related items to buy plus a long list of essentials needed for survival. I've managed to find some really cool stuff by reading a long list of articles about 4x4 back country living and the 'RV life'. For instance, I've found a 12 volt refrigerator that uses an actual compressor (not thermoelectric coolers), made by an outfit in Australia, that is so frugal it runs off a parked car battery for days and leaves enough juice to start the engine. No more soggy bread or warm soda for me ... no sir! And a Honda generator that's so clean I can run my computers off it but is so quiet you need to really strain to hear it. Add to these all the basics one needs to live off the grid and it boggles the mind. Maybe someday I'll publish a list of all the items I've acquired during the first few months of this adventure. Sure hope the bank account holds up under the strain!
The Old Tree Deep in the Forest
I lived for many years in western Connecticut. One of my most favorite places in this world is a privately owned preserved in Washington, CT called Hidden Valley. To find it you head north from Danbury on Rt. 7 to New Milford ... look for the big iron bridge crossing the Housatonic River. Follow the signs through town to Rt. 202 and head north until reaching Rt. 47. Turn south and drive a few miles to Bee Brook bridge. Park in the gravel parking area just before the bridge and follow the trail to the river and beyond. It's an amazing place.
Anyway, during my last trip home I spent an afternoon wandering through the preserve, looking for interesting compositions. I found these two, old trees just off the trail. The wonderful grouping of tree trunks, moss and small plants really struck me. This is an HDR image with a bit of post in Photoshop. mostly to bring out the colors in the bark and to darken the background. What a wonderful place to drink in nature's beauty.
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| The Hidden Forest - 25 mm(1.6 crop), 1/2 sec, f/3.2 (license CC BY-NC 4.0) |
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