Greetings from Savannah…Panera Bread, who would have guessed? I counted recently and I’ve been to Panera’s in ten different states in the last month. My mother is highly jealous, her closest Turkey Artichoke Foccacia Panini is seven hours away in Las Vegas. It seems like it’s been forever since I last updated my website, but I wound up taking a couple days off to regroup and relax, find some new motivation, and also did a whole lot of driving one day, too. You’d think this would mean I shouldn’t have been all that behind with the photo editing, but I seem to have found my groove again, at least in a couple locations, and wound up having a lot of images that I felt compelled to put in the “Edit Now” folder.

After finishing the editing and posting new photos from the Panera in Charles Town, West Virginia, I opted to take the rest of the day off, took my 4Runner in for an oil change, grocery shopped, and read a Dean Koontz book while it drizzled lightly. Wednesday proved to have much better weather and I headed out to Harper’s Ferry, site of John Brown’s 1859 raid, to wander around the Virginius Island industrial ruins, and photograph what’s left of the St. Johns Episcopalian Church. I was glad that I was still ahead of schedule by a full day (due my rather sudden departure from Maine) and didn’t need to rush, since I spent much longer there than I would have thought and played around with infrared shots of the church. From there I followed the Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park, which was pretty, but all looked pretty much the same as well. I’m sure it will be absolutely gorgeous in another week or so when the leaves turn though. I’ve seen little patches of fall here and there for weeks now, but overall have been at least a week ahead of the leaf change everywhere I’ve gone. Short of an early fall, I already knew I was going to have to miss out on the autumn colors if I wanted to make it to Albuquerque in time for the Balloon Fiesta.

I spent my other free day in the Knoxville area, parking inconspicuously in a lot neighboring a hotel and watching the season premiers of as many of my tv shows as I could find online. It was a little warm in my car, but well worth it to satisfy my curiosity regarding some of last season’s cliff hangers. Friday dawned nice and overcast, perfect for shooting waterfalls, and I set off for the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Motor Nature Trail itself is a six-mile, 10mph, one-way, single laned road that twists and winds along and over the Little Pigeon River. This is by far my favorite place in the park. I hiked out to Grotto Falls, which were lovely, and even more lovely because I arrived early enough to be the only person at the falls the whole time I spent shooting there. I then spent a couple more hours working my way down the road and pulling off at various pullovers to check out the cascades and moss covered rocks. I was very much in my element, and having one of those “This is why I am a photographer” moments…It was good.

After making a second loop around the Motor Nature Trail to get back to the Baskins Falls Trailhead (which weren’t worth the hike, unfortunately) I headed out towards the Cades Cove area of the park and drove the scenic loop there to scout out potential spots for sunrise the following morning. I absolutely hate Cades Cove, but it’s too picturesque to ignore. The scenic loop is eleven miles long, and a single-lane, one-way road. It wouldn’t be so bad if the hoards of people who drive it paid any attention to the signs imploring them to be courteous and use the pullouts. I realize that I am fortunate to have seen as much wildlife as I have over the years, and don’t feel compelled to take a photo of every deer I see, and I really don’t begrudge others for doing that, I just wish they wouldn’t stop in the middle of the road to do so. That said, I must admit that the bear and her cubs running across the field towards the forest were intriguing, and when I saw them again more closely when the road wound through the trees, the cubs were downright cute, even at a distance, as they clumsily clawed their way over downed trees.

Unfortunately, nature had other plans for sunrise the following morning, and I woke up several times during the night to rain. It had seemed like it was done for a bit so I set off on the five mile roundtrip hike to Abrams Falls. No sooner had I pulled my camera out at the falls than the downpour started. I threw my rain jacket over my camera so I could get some shots before tossing my camera in my bag with my jacket draped over my backpack like a cape for the hike back. The warm rain actually felt quite nice, though I was thoroughly drenched by the time I got back to my car. The Cades Cove scenic loop had been fairly empty when I’d headed out to the falls trailhead earlier, but I found myself sitting in traffic for quite a while on my way out. I stopped at the visitors center later and spoke with a ranger and asked why they haven’t installed a shuttle bus system like they have at the Grand Canyon or Zion National Park, and also got into a lengthy discussion about why entrance fees aren’t charged for the Great Smokies. I’ve been mentally composing the letter I will be writing lobbying to close Cades Cove to private automobiles, which would make the visitor experience infinitely better in my opinion, and how to fund such a program.

I was supposed to have spent that evening and the next morning taking photos from Clingman’s Dome, but the pouring rain put an end to those plans. I was feeling too restless to sit around and wait out the weather and opted to scratch my upcoming waterfall shoots in Georgia and South Carolina (overcast is good, rain, not so much…wet trails and wet rocks lead to slippery footing and lots of falling!), as well as skip Congaree National Park, which I was going to mainly because it was on the way, and I am determined to one day visit all of the national parks, but this one is a swamp, and full of snakes…lots and lots of snakes…need I say more?. Instead, I chose to head for the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I knew this detour was going to add some mileage to my route to Charleston, but apparently my math just wasn’t all that great that afternoon, or I was choosing to delude myself in regards to exactly how much further it would be, but I really wasn’t expecting to add a full 450 miles to the route, oops. I also never realized just how long North Carolina is from the western point down in the Great Smokies out to the Outer Banks…about five hundred miles, I now know. And for me, that was five hundred miles of rain. I don’t think my car was this clean even after I ran it through a car wash in Traverse City (free with my oil change), and even better, I don’t think you can see any dried puke remains on the front anymore (someone vomited on my car at a bar while I was home last, eew, how gross is that? And yes, I did try to hose it off, but it was already pretty dried on there). So much for a weather forecast of just a chance of rain on the coast…

It rained off and on Sunday morning and actually seemed like it was clearing up enough that I headed down the beach at Cape Hatteras a ways to get some shots of the lighthouse from the dunes. On my way back, the wind picked up and it started to downpour, and though I knew my camera wouldn’t be happy, I was loathe to pack it away when the waves were crashing and just asking to be photographed. The cloth diaper I was holding over my camera while I shot (all bright and cheery with rainbows and bears) wasn’t quite enough protection though and I’ve now come to the conclusion that when I “broke” my camera earlier this trip on Mt. Rainier, it was more likely the rain that was causing the intitial symptoms (not that body slamming my camera and putting a hairline crack along the lens mount was a good thing either). This would explain why it fixed itself, since it likely just got wetter than I thought it had, and then dried out. Thankfully, my new camera’s rain symptoms weren’t as severe and I was able to shoot through most of its little temper tantrums. By the time I had to catch the ferry from Cape Hatteras out to Ocracoke Island, where I would catch the last ferry of the day back to the mainland, the rain had stopped and it was turning into an absolutely beautiful day. This little detour may have cost me a tank and a half in gas, as well as a missed campground reservation and a ferry ticket, but I think a day at the beach was exactly what I needed! I had a great time.

I’d been looking forward to the South Carolina portion of my trip for quite some time. Not only was I going to get to return to one of my favorite cemeteries, but I’d also found a couple of church ruins I’ve been quite eager to shoot (thanks to Paul, who gave me a coffeetable book for my birthday last year, “American Ruins,” which inspired me to expand my love of urban decay to also include historic ruins). After stopping to shower at a state park on my way down from Wilmington, NC, I had some extra time so I headed out to Summerville to see my friend Hillarie’s new house. She’s been living in Salt Lake for the last couple years but is moving back to South Carolina, where she’s from. I was originally going to crash on the floor at her new place, but due to the flooding in Atlanta, she’s had to push back her closing date. She’s a  catastrophe damage inspector for one of the major insurance companies and I suspect that she’ll be spending a lot of time in Atlanta for quite a while. Her house, which is brand new, was very cute and I peeked in all the windows and wished I was in the spot to be buying my own house already…gotta get out of debt again first though. Wait, gotta finish this trip first before I can even stop putting myself further into debt!

The Magnolia Cemetery was just as great as I remembered (how many cemeteries have a sign at the entrance stating it’s illegal to feed the alligators?) and I think much of the wrought iron fencing that surrounds many of the older plots was even more rusted and dilapidated than when I was there three years ago. It was also windy that day, and when I looked at the pictures later, the moss blowing in the trees has a very haunted look, and in some cases it looks like the trees are attacking the headstones. Unfortunately, there is a  downside to taking pictures in a cemetery that sits on the edge of the swamp…mosquitoes. I hated to have to use bug spray when I had just showered, but the horse-fly sized mosquitoes quickly changed my mind (I saw a bumper sticker yesterday with a picture of a gigantic mosquito on it, and the words “South Carolina State Bird”) and I wound up dousing myself in Deet more than once and still got bit several times.

Yesterday I went down to Folly Beach for an extremely unextraorindary sunrise at the pier before heading out to the Morris Island Lighthouse. Apparently the lighthouse, which sits roughly 1600 feet out in the bay, used to be on solid land. When they started building jetties in hopes that the channel into Charleston would deepen (which it did) the silt flow also changed out near the lighthouse and over time completely eroded away the island that it stood on. I hadn’t remembered the lighthouse being quite that far out in the bay, and also had forgotten that my old 300mm lens hasn’t been all that fabulous after I dropped it at a waterfall in the Columbia River Gorge last trip, and then stepped on it so it wouldn’t roll off the cliff, so I no longer carry it. My new 70-200mm zoom is amazing, but 200mm definitely isn’t 300mm…I wasn’t all that upset about not getting good shots at the lighthouse, it just meant I could head to my church ruins all the sooner.

The Pon Pon Chapel of Ease and the Chapel of Ease down at St Helena’s Island (small churches for the plantation workers since they were too far way from the bigger churches in Beaufort) weren’t all that exciting, but Old Sheldon Church was everything I was hoping it would be. Built in the mid-1700′s, it was burned during the Revolutionary War, then rebuilt in the 1820′s, and burned again during the Civil War. There were probably twenty people who came and went during the couple hours I spent there, but most just took a quick look and headed elsewhere, so I had the place to myself most of the time. I found the ruins, with their huge brick columns and scattered grave stones, in the midst of a grassy clearing with moss-hung trees, absolutely fascinating. It was a little windy for shooting with an infrared filter, which often requires minute-long exposures even with a high ISO setting, so there’s more movement in the trees than I’d have liked, but I am still quite pleased with the photos I took there.

And that about catches things up. I had planned to stay in Beaufort last night (side note, I once asked Hillarie if she’d been to “Bowfort” and she said, “No, but I have been to “Byoufort!”)  so that I could shoot the church ruins again this morning if I needed, but I was content with my shots and headed down to Savannah yesterday afternoon instead. I’ve now done a much-needed load of laundry, and just finished many, many hours of editing. Hopefully you’ll enjoy browsing through my moss covered rock cascades, waves, and cemetery and church ruins. I’m not exactly sure when I’ll post the next update, or from where. I’m spending the next couple days sleeping in my little tent out on Cumberland Island so I can photograph the Dungeness Mansion ruins there, and hopefully get in some moonlight shots of the ruins as well. From there, I’ve got an afternoon at some plantation ruins in Florida before I head towards my all time favorite cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi, and then it’s on to San Antonio as I work my way towards Albuquerque, and then home. The second leg of my trip is starting to wind down, and I’m excited to come home for a few days and be social, and shower regularly. Someone book a show please!!! James, Chris…??? Hint, hint…

Oh, and speaking of being social, which reminds me of all my nearest and dearest…A big thank you to everyone who emailed, texted, or called following Paul and I’s breakup. I’m generally pretty aware anyway that I have a lot of really great people in my life, but I was especially grateful for that last week. Love you all…

New photos in the West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina,  South Carolina, Magnolia Cemetery, and Old Sheldon Church albums.

Hello from Rockville, Maryland. I think? Definitely somewhere just outside of Washington, DC, and definitely not Portland, Maine, where thirty-six hours ago I still expected to be today…My big plan for this trip hasn’t wound up being much of a “plan” lately, more like a “guideline” instead. Maine was good for a bit…rocky coastal sunrises at Acadia National Park, miles of hiking along the old carriage roads, good clouds at the Bass Harbor Lighthouse, a beautiful sunset at the Marshall Point Lighthouse…it also saw the demise of Paul and I’s relationship, at which point I scrapped my remaining Maine lighthouse shoots and left New England all together. I find driving cathartic, at least when I don’t have to drive through traffic, and sometimes I wonder why I worry so much about wearing ear plugs when I go to shows for as loud as the music in my car gets some days. Eight hours of driving later I was on the New Jersey shore, where I caught a lovely sunrise this morning at the Ocean Grove Pier. A conversation with a fellow photographer, who was more than happy to fill me in on all the great local spots to shoot, headed me towards the Sandy Hook Lighthouse and the battery ruins at Fort Hancock. A couple more hours of driving landed me at the Great Falls of the Potomac, but sadly the water levels are just too low for the falls to be all that interesting. I think I’m heading towards Harper’s Ferry and Shenandoah National Park, and after that, who knows? My next round of campground reservations don’t start until Friday night down at the Great Smoky Mountains…

Unfortunately, the new photos will have to wait until tomorrow to post, sorry…Panera is closing and I’m nowhere near being done editing, and I desperately need some sleep.

Update: New pictures have now been posted in the following albums…Maine,  Acadia National Park,  New Jersey, and Maryland.  Also, now that I’ve had my new 5d Mark II for a week, I can officially say that I am absolutely in love with it. The detail that I can capture with 21 megapixels is amazing, the LCD screen is big and pretty and automatically adjusts the brightness so I can always see it, and the built in sensor cleaner, while not perfect, is doing a nice job of keeping the dust spots to a minimum. I had heard some people say that with 21 megapixels it became all too clear how crappy their technique was when they zoomed into actual pixel level, the focus was too soft, etc, but I’ve been very relieved to find that the last couple years of forcing myself to shoot with a tripod more often than not, and pay attention to my depth of field, has actually given me fairly decent technique. Yay!

Greetings from Panera Bread in Augusta! I’ve been here since before seven this morning, about 9 1/2 hours now, I’m working on my second bagel, and I’ve also eaten lunch here…I’m Finally caught up on the editing though (well, with everything that was in the “Edit Now” folder…the “Edit Later” folder just keeps getting uglier). I was supposed to have left hours ago if I wanted to make it to Acadia National Park before sunset, but I decided I needed to sit and edit and update, I’ve been stressing about when I was going to get all that done. It’s been a really busy last few days, but I think things are finally calming down again. I have my brand new camera now (and my sister has just ever so kindly offered to lend me money so I can pay that off and not pay interest on it) and hopefully I won’t be having to make any more several hundred mile detours in the near future.

After leaving the Panera in Grand Haven last WednesdayI started contemplating when I was going to be able to get my increasingly temperamental camera fixed, and realized that I was running out of business days if I wanted to avoid missing my campground reservations in New Hampshire and Maine. I wound up hurrying down to Cleveland Thursday and went to Dodd Camera to have them take a look at it. Their senior repair technician was out of the office that day and Nancy, though very helpful, wasn’t comfortable with diagnosing my camera so I took my camera back and set off for Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the repair would just have to wait til the next day.

As I was trying to find  my way down to the park I drove by the Garfield Heights Post Office and remembered all the backup discs that I needed to mail home, which prompted me to meet Mary, one of the ladies at the counter there. She was wonderful and not only gave me directions, but also told me about her favorite historic cemetery there in Cleveland, Lakeview Cemetery. After spending a while taking pictures at Brandywine Falls (I’m still on that “texture” kick and wound up obsessing over the different rock colors along the trail to the falls) and then headed down to The Ledges area of the park. I really had no idea what to expect there, but it wound up being an extremely interesting place. I should have paid more attention to what kind of rock it was, but there were large moss covered cliffs with caves and narrow cracks you could hike through. And more really cool rock textures! I finally was forced to leave when it started to get dark and I wound up heading back up to Cleveland so I could find a Walmart and scout out the cemetery location in case I had time in the morning before going back to the camera shop.

I actually found the cemetery easily enough, though it turned out to be in a rather bad part of town, with many condemned buildings lining the road along the one side of it. I then managed to get lost while trying to find my way back to the Walmart I was intending to park at for the night, and my scenic tour of Cleveland took me through more bad neighborhoods, and then some Extremely wealthy ones with huge houses (very pretty, even in the dark), and I also stumbled across Case Western Reserve University, where my mom got her Masters. And, after all that, I never did wind up having time Friday to go back to the cemetery!

I won’t bore you again with the details of my conversation with Miguel, the great technician who didn’t have the parts to fix my camera, but also didn’t charge me for the diagnosis either. After convincing myself that buying the new Canon 5D Mark II was my best route, and then tracking one down (they’ve been out since the end of last year but the demand is still greater than the supply) I set off for Niagara Falls. It rained as I drove through Pennsylvania and was still quite gloomy when I arrived at the falls so I wasn’t too worried about just barely having missed sunset. A big thank you to the state park employee there who gave me a ride back to my car in his golf cart – I’d stopped him to ask if they tow vehicles parked down on the parkway after dark, and he didn’t think that area was well lit enough for me by myself and wanted me to move my car to the much better lit Goat Island parking lot since it was just hitting 8pm and turning into free parking. I really do meet nice people everywhere I go. With my car moved to Goat Island, I set off to catch the falls lit up at night. Huge spotlights on the Canadian side of the falls illuminate both American Falls and Horseshoe Falls until midnight, and certain days of the week during the summer season they also set off fireworks. I was originally supposed to have made to to Niagara Falls on my 2006 trip, but a freak snowstorm lead me to change my plans. I was very glad I finally made it. I generally don’t care for the big waterfalls – little dainty ones photograph much better, but Niagara Falls was worth seeing…especially rainbow colored!

The following morning I hiked around the falls again and crossed the Rainbow Bridge to Canada (the best views are from the Canadian side, and I’d gone through the trouble of getting a passport card since my passport had expired, and I was determined to use it) but it was just extremely overcast so I didn’t stick around long. I needed to be in New York City the next day to purchase camera batteries and an L-bracket for my new camera, and as I was looking at the map to see what my best route would be, I noticed highlighter marks in Pennsylvania. As luck would have it, Ricketts Glen State Park was more or less on my way. I’d come across the park, known for its waterfalls, when I was doing my research and had wanted to go there, but it was nowhere near my intended route and didn’t make the cut. I also knew there had been a New York state park I had wanted to go to, also for its waterfalls, but I hadn’t given myself any highlighter clues for it and couldn’t remember the name. Oddly enough though, as I was driving down to Ricketts Glen, I saw the name “Watkins Glen” on a freeway sign and instantly knew that was the park I had been trying to think of, and quickly exited the freeway to head to the park.

Watkins Glen kept reminding me of a rain forest crossed with some sort of medieval castle. Stone walkways and staircases wound through tunnels alongside waterfalls and streams, with lots of greenery along many of the cliff walls. It was well worth the detour. I had also correctly remembered that Ricketts Glen was indeed known for its waterfalls, but what I hadn’t realized was that the Falls Trail actually looped through a whopping twenty-one waterfalls. The 3 1/2 mile trail took me as many hours to complete the next morning since I stopped constantly. I would have taken longer had the sun not started to shine on most of the falls along one half of the loop, which was just as well. I was starting to worry that I wasn’t going to make it to B&H before they closed. I made good time on the remainder of the drive to NYC, and was so thankful that it was Sunday…traffic was tolerable and I managed to make it in and out of Manhattan without stressing too much. I also didn’t have to deal with the whole parking issue since B&H has a very small lot and I was spending enough money there for my short stay to be free. I was rather concerned however, since the lot was rather full and I wound up leaving my car parked on the sidewalk, keys in the ignition, so that the parking lot attendant could move my car once space opened up.

The B&H store was actually way more nerve-wracking that driving in the city. It’s a massive photography and video equipment store, and though I’m sure their system works well and keeps theft to a minimum, I found it highly confusing. There is one entrance (bags must be left at the front) and one exit, and shopping is done by going to the counter in each department where they add your item to your “shopping cart” through their computer and you receive a ticket to take to the cashier. After paying, you go through the merchandise pickup line, where your items have already been bagged and are hanging on a numbered hook. I lucked out and the gentleman at the order processing line was able to enter my purchases into the computer without me having to go to each of the departments since I already knew exactly what I needed. Still, I’d much prefer buy from them online.

Shopping successfully completed (my car and all my gear did just fine with the B&H attendants), I started heading north, figuring I’d go ahead and shoot Bash Bish Falls on my way up to Manchester, New Hampshire to pick up my camera, which would allow me to change my route on the way down the coast from Maine. I realized I also wasn’t that far from the Fairfield Hills State Hospital and decided to stop there as well. The hospital has been closed for quite some time, but the grounds are open to the public as a park. Since I was there in 2006, a couple of the buildings have been remodeled and it looks like they’re starting work on the main Kirkbride building as well, it looked like all the old peeling paint had been removed from the columns and entrance way. I wandered for a while, but it was gloomy, and only cleared up just as the sun was starting to set.

I started Monday morning off at Bash Bish Falls, a pretty little waterfall in the southwestern corner of Massachusetts. The sign at the trail head warned about Timber Rattlesnakes and showed a photo of one in some leaves, and also noted that two snakes had been seen on one of the trails a couple days before. This of course set off my snake paranoia (I’ve encountered three snakes on this trip so far, all of them very clearly garter snakes, which don’t bother me) and I really didn’t have any fun taking pictures at the falls since I was in such a high state of alert. Intrigued by a couple other highlighter marks on my road atlas, I took a slightly longer route to Manchester and detoured by Northampton to see if the insane asylum there had been torn down yet (it had) and checked out the cemetery in historic Deerfield, which wasn’t all that exciting but did have a lot of 250 year old graves.

My revised plan had intended for me to pick up my camera and then head out to Vermont to shoot three waterfalls there before heading to the campground at Franconia Notch, but my dilly-dallying had caused me to run late. It seemed silly to drive all the way out to the falls when I’d only have an hour there to shoot, especially since the campground was due north of Manchester. I opted to instead start the editing process since I stumbled across a Panera there (I really can edit while seated at the Rubbermaid tub in the back of my car, but it’s just so much more comfortable to sit in a chair, at a table…) and then charged my new camera battery (the charger came with the camera itself, so I had been unable to charge the batteries I’d purchased the day before) on the way up to Franconia Notch. The 5D Mark II has all sorts of new features (it took Canon three years to come out with the new version of my old 5D) and I actually had to read quite a bit of the manual to understand the new options. Having spent yesterday shooting with the new camera, I’m really liking it, though with 21 megapixels, I’ll be making a lot more backup discs than I’d expected. Of course this also means I can make some really big enlargements, not that I know what I’d do with anything that big!

Getting closer to the end, we’re up to yesterday now! I woke up Monday night around 2am to the sound of rain pounding on the roof of my car, and was reminded of the last time I was in New Hampshire – after it downpoured for twelve hours straight, nearly all of the waterfalls I had intended to shoot had turned into monster falls that put out too much spray to even want to take the camera out of the pack. Thankfully, the rain was short-lived, and Franconia Notch State Park was awesome. I spent a while hiking around the free trails while I waited for the entrance to the Flume Gorge to open. Short of being there when everything was in peak leaf change, my timing couldn’t have been better. I was one of the first people into the gorge, and this late in the season, I really didn’t have to compete with hordes of tourists so I often had the narrow boardwalk to myself, which was good since my tripod took up most of it. Ferns and moss lined the rocks and water flowed through the gorge with Avalanche Falls up at the far end. The sun threatened to come out several times, but overall remained nicely overcast, perfect for shooting waterfalls. The park was very cool, and well worth the thirteen bucks it cost me to get in there. It was made even better by the new camera, since I knew that I could shoot long exposures and not have to worry about editing out the various dead pixels that would have appeared with my old camera. (Speaking of which, I’d had to chance cleaning the sensor after I saw the Niagara Falls photos – the camera tech had wandered around with the camera body without a lens, and it had collected all sorts of dust during that and when he was testing the CCD Converter – it was the quickest I’ve ever cleaned the sensor – swab in, swab out! and I knew I wasn’t very thorough, but any dust I got off the sensor was an improvement!)

After dragging myself away from Franconia Notch, I stopped at a couple other New Hampshire waterfalls and then decided to take advantage of the still gloomy day by fitting in the Maine waterfalls I had planned to shoot this morning. Unfortunately, my directions for two of the falls weren’t all that great (I think he had a dyslexic moment and the 2.5 miles was probably more like 5.2) and it took me well over an hour of driving up and down this crappy back road before I stumbled across the right trail) and then after I hiked out to the falls, the water level was so slow that they were thoroughly uninteresting. By that time I was annoyed enough that I opted to skip the neighboring Dunn Falls, which likely were also too low to be of interest, so I instead skipped ahead to Screw Auger Falls, which thankfully proved to be extremely well marked, and quite pretty.

And I think that pretty much covers everything…it had better, it’s now dinner time and I’ve been at Panera for oh, 11 1/2 hours… I’ll be in Maine for the next several days, and since the sun is down before seven each night, and I no longer have to worry about editing out mass quantities of dust spots and dead pixels and scratches out of my photos, I should be able to keep up with the editing and be ready to post again from Portland on Monday…After having just kind of winged things and ignored the trip plan so much lately, it’s kinda strange to actually know where I intend to be and when again!

New photos have been posted in the Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.

I’ve found a Canon 5d Mark II camera body in Manchester, NH and will be picking it up on Monday (the camera store I was working with here in Cleveland had already sold the one the senior repair tech thought they had in stock). Sunday I’ll be stopping in NYC to go to the B&H Super Store (the camera dealer I purchase all of my equipment through online) to purchase the L-bracket and batteries, since Hunt’s Camera in Manchester doesn’t have them in stock. Technically, B&H has a 5D Mark II in stock, but don’t expect it will still be there by Sunday…however, they wouldn’t let me prepay for it and have them hold it since it’s over $1500, which seems like a stupid policy. They’d be happy to ship it to me though. Very helpful…And now with all the necessary arrangements made for acquiring my new gear, I’m off to Niagara Falls, which I had to scratch from the 2006 plan after a freak blizzard dumped two feet of snow on Buffalo.

Greetings from Cleveland…this isn’t an official update, there are no new pictures to view, or statistics to check out…I merely want to rant. I’ve been meaning to mention my continuing camera issues, but never seem to remember that, or have the time, when I’m actually writing a post. Yes, my camera did miraculously fix itself after the Mt. Rainier incident…but a few weeks ago it started developing a new set of problems, most of which were simply annoying but ignorable. It would randomly become unresponsive, and the top display where it shows the aperture and shutter speed settings would blink off and on rapidly, or I’d be scrolling through the pictures on the memory card and the screen would go black, even though I hadn’t pressed the shutter button or told the camera that I was done looking at images. Obnoxious, but I can live with this. One other seemingly minor problem could prove absolutely disastrous though. Normally, the only way to cancel out of sensor cleaning mode is by actually turning the power switch off. Lately, the camera has taken to ending the sensor cleaning mode on its own. This may not sound that bad, but if it cancels the cleaning mode while I still have a sensor cleaning swap in the camera, removing the dust spots, I’ll need to replace the mirror, shutter mechanism, and the sensor. It would basically be cheaper just to buy a new camera.

Which is sort of what I’m thinking now…I could replace the CCD Converter, which is wearing out, for about $300, and solve all the current problems…unfortunately, it’s not a part that the repair shops keep in stock, and I would lose several days, if not a week or more, waiting for repair. Technically, my camera works and I can continue to take pictures, but the dust spots will keep building up since I can’t chance cleaning them, and this just leads to more work in Photoshop to get rid of them. Not to mention, I’d still be left with the fact that my camera is over three years old, and has taken over 60,000 pictures, and the shutter mechanism will need replaced eventually anyway as well, probably sooner than later if the CCD Converter has already started to die. I also have two annoying scratches on the sensor which I have to edit out in Photoshop. They drive me batty, but that alone didn’t warrant buying a new camera. The gentleman at the repair shop this morning also pointed out that it appears when I fell on my camera, it got a hairline crack along the ring-mount for the lens, and it’s now started to corrode slightly. This also means that if I get caught in a rainstorm, water has a direct route to the processor and motherboard and all that fun electronic stuff inside my camera.

You can see my dilemma….and why I’m leaning toward just spending the money (via credit card and the ensuing interest I’ll have to pay) to buy the new Canon 5D Mark II, the new version of my camera which came out last fall. It’s a beautiful camera, and I drooled over it, but couldn’t make myself spend the money when my 5D was working just fine. The new camera is 21 megapixels, shoots HD video, has a Live View LCD (I’d be able to compose a shot without having to look through the viewfinder all the time, which makes odd-angle shots much easier), a built-in sensor cleaner, and with the enhanced ISO settings, I can shoot in much lower light with much better results which would make taking pictures for my bands a lot easier. Nearly all of my equipment is compatible with the new camera, all I’d need are new batteries, and a new L-bracket to connect the camera to my tripod head. All this, for only about $3,000…

As my mom pointed out, it doesn’t do me any good to be taking this trip if I don’t have a working, reliable camera, and I know this isn’t an opportunity I’ll get again. I know I thought my 2006 trip was a once in a lifetime trip, and here I am at it again, but I KNOW this is the last trip of this scale (and I’m not even halfway done yet). I don’t want to live in my parents’ basement forever (and I doubt they want me there forever, even if it is a good arrangement so far). I’d like a house someday, and that means being responsible and putting down roots, and not taking off for months at a time. So yeah, I think I’m going to suck it up and buy the new 5D Mark II, and be able to enjoy this adventure without worrying about having to drastically rearrange my schedule to fit in a repair, and someday when I have lots of money (the keyword was “someday”) I’ll fix my (soon-to-be-old) camera and have it converted to infrared or something like that.

I think I’m feeling better about this.