Road Ramblings

So I spent the day on the road yesterday. Drove down to a farm just south of La Crosse, Wisconsin to photograph a tractor for the 2008 Farmall Calendar (you'll be able to pre-order this at Amazon.com in a few months--watch this space for a note).

Nice to be out shooting, and nice to be on the road. Some observations from the day.

The built-in navigation system on my Garmin GPS V sucks. I used Mapquest to lay out the route, and the Garmin wanted me to go east on 94. I didn’t. Mapquest (and my contact from La Crosse) told me the way to go was down 52 to 90. The funny part was once I passed 94, the Garmin didn’t recalculate for an hour or so and told me I had 485 miles to go when the actual mileage was 175 or so. Stupid thing.

I like open spaces. I don’t particularly care for the flat, open section of southern Minnesota around Rochester. It has this sort of run-down, mullet and Quiet Riot feel that I don’t care for, but I do like seeing big expanses of sky. There’s something liberating about driving down a nearly flat road with nothing but sky and road in your plane of view. Clears the mind.

A couple of notes from the shoot (despite having done this for a while, I'm still learning ;-) ).

Bring a gazetteer along. Being able to pinpoint precise locations, beyond what you can do with a state map or a slightly whacked GPS unit, would have helped me find my destination (which was off the built-in grid on the GPS and off the Mapquest map).

The winter light is harsh and unusable mid-day, but warms up nicely about 2:30 p.m. and is nice and bright until about 4:30. The saturated light from 4:30 to 5:30 was nice but changed colors enough to be distracting.

Always bring my doubler. I could have used more lens for a shot. I had one of the machiines up high on the hill, and could squeeze a bit of cornfield, the tractor, and the blue sky into the shot. I shot it with my 200 and got it reasonably compressed, but it wasn’t as clean as what I had in mind. A 400 would have been perfect.

I’m concerned about the cheap-ish Manfrotto ballhead ($60) I bought. It just didn’t feel terribly stable. I may have to drop some money on a high-end ballhead down the road. The images confirm my suspicions about the unit's stability--some of the longer shots are not sharp. I shot them using the 2-second timer on the Canon and had the ballhead clamped down, so there's not much more I can do with the tripod. I wonder if I can find a good ballhead used?

I need to make sure that second battery for the 1DS arrives shortly. The battery died several times, as the cold shut it down. I put it in my pocket and warmed it up, which bought me another 10 minutes of time before it died again, but it wasn’t really that cold—the thermometer in my Audi read 24 degrees when I drove up. On a colder day, I would have been struggling with only one batttery.

I stayed relatively warm, by the way. I wore wool long johns under light pants and a heavy snowmobiling jacket. My hands got cold—I would have liked some chemical hand warmers in the my pockets, and a better pair of gloves. I used motocross gloves, which were too thick to allow me to use the small buttons on the back of the camera, and not all that warm. I think some thin poly gloves would be a good addition.

After waxing nostalgic about driving Sam’s pickup last week, I have to say, I really enjoy being on the road in the Audi. The car feels tight and is comfortable, reasonably powerful, and smooth. It’s an effective tool, plus the stereo is good.

Lastly, under the category of what six hours in the car with a CD player does to you, I've come to these conclusions: Jack White is a genius, The Pixies live up to the hype, and I want to hear more of the Dresden Dolls--those vocals are amazing.

Over and out, L