11/25 - Back.

So I skipped a few days. I spent the time digesting what I had done while we were in Iceland, because it really felt like a lot.

On the way to the airport for the flight back, we stopped at the Blue Lagoon, which is conveniently located only 10 minutes from the airport.  It's a big, salty, egg scented, geothermically-heated wading pool with a spa built around it.  It's made blue by whatever minerals is loaded with, as opposed to the optical shenanigans going on at Jokulsarlon. We were there first in line in the morning and jumped right in to watch the orange glow of sunrise intensify over the mountains above the teal lagoon. Then dark clouds drifted in and our heads were pelted with a rattle of sleet, which had little effect thanks to the hot water we waded in.

I don't normally float very well, not even in the ocean, but the minerals in the water made me especially buoyant and for the firs time I could float on my back, and I bobbed between earth and sky and ice and fire.  

The contrast did not go unappreciated; it got my brain away from all the questions I was asking myself towards the end of the trip, which, of course, were photography related.  Did I expose for the right zones and do the right math?  How many shots did I waste with the lens cap on?  Was the lens fogged up when I took that photo by the waterfall?  How much did the tripod move?  Did I even remember to consider my composition in the midst of all this?

Sure, I was still having a good time towards the end, but whenever I had an idle moment my brain would wander to a shot I took in the previous week and wonder how it turned out.  It's all because I've never done serious landscape photography before, and it felt a lot like the first time I did wedding photography -- completely unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and overwhelming.  

I would trace my timeline back to when I took the shot and review everything -- what the meter read and what my settings were, what I wanted to take a picture of and where it was in the frame, where the light was and where it wasn't.  I can even remember how many segments of the tripod I had extended.  In between, I remember the sounds and smells and the rest of just being there that guided my framelines.

Not bad, considering I don't remember what I had for breakfast this morning.

Anyway, I'm waiting on the film and scans, which come back tomorrow. It's the usual excitement and fear of waiting to see if anything you shot on vacation even came out at all.  Shooting film makes you extremely aware of your success and failure. Here I am with 7 rolls in the lab without any idea if the time, effort, and money I put into them was really worth it. It's enough that there won't be such a thing as breaking even. 

For something like this it will be a very binary yes or no.