The one thing that you can't forget when you go to the Southwest, be it Texas, New Mexico, Arizona or the lower section of California, is your camera. It's just a very bad idea and you'll find yourself swearing, profusely, at every sunset, every gorgeous mountainside, and every amazing cloud formation. Being a photographer, you would think that I would no better than to break that rule. You'd be wrong. Rather than fight with a second ($50) checked bag and deal with the idiocy of the current airline debacle trying to get everything into one good sized carry on or "personal bag," I opted to leave my gear at home and hope that Connor's camera had a memory card in El Paso. Once again, wrong.
So, after four days of gnashing teeth, I spent $24 on an 8GB HDSD card. The price is only relevant inasmuch as the 4GB card I got him for Christmas the previous year was $80... Once the card was in place, there was only one thing to do. I pointed the car due west and headed straight to Franklin Mountains State Park.
In looking at the clock, I did allow myself to swear. It was 11:15am, which meant by the time I arrived at the mountains, it would be very close to high noon -- the worst time imaginable to photograph topography. The light will cast harsh shadows that tend to remove contrast rather than enhance it and just about all photographs you
take will end up looking flat, even if you're looking out over a very dynamic landscape. You can imagine, however, my elation when clouds started forming over the mountains and the plateau. It was divine intervention, without question.
The ups
hot of this serendipity was finishing my Photo III final's shooting phase. I didn't know this, at the time, but when I showed Prof Jurus, he seemed well pleased. That took a lot of pressure off the coming quarter and put me in a good position to get things the way I want them to be rather than "how they end up," for printing the final. None of this would have been possible if I hadn't decided to splurge on the memory card and it wouldn't have been an issue if I had simply packed a camera body.
