From reading my reflections on working with what the day brings, a few readers seem to have gotten the impression I’m some kind of blissed-out mystic. Nothing could be farther from the truth!

This past week, a photographer friend dropped me a note letting me know he had taken a stress test.  Thinking back to my photography experience earlier that day, I suggested to Tony that the next time he needs a stress test I could suggest a less expensive way he could do it. My challenges with the camera that day, and the way I dealt with them, were a little different from the experience I had the previous weekend shooting up at the Rio Grande Del Norte National Preserve.  (Fortunately, at the point when a school bus full of children came by near where I was shooting, I had already said what I needed to say.)

That evening, I wrote to my friend, “The next time you need to take a stress test, consider borrowing my 4×5 field camera. Make sure you set the extension for the lens you’ve mounted, otherwise you won’t be able to focus the image, and you won’t know why. Remember to cock the shutter. Don’t forget to close the lens before you pull the dark slide on the film holder. If you fail to do that, you will ruin a sheet of film. Set the shutter speed and aperture for the proper exposure, and remember to check the exposure with your hand-held camera, the one you can’t find because you covered it with the focusing cloth. And, be careful when you pick up your camera bag. You set it down on an ant mound, one that would have been obvious to you, if you had not been trying to think about half a dozen other things. Great fun!”

Out of all that frustration, I took a picture that may at least come close to being worth the effort. – Mark Schumann