well, there are a couple ways you could go...

Let's say you live on Loire Ave in Poway, California, outside of San Diego (above). You're trying to get to a house on Charlotte Terrace in Ridgefield, New Jersey (below). When you look at the map to try to figure out how to get there, you wouldn't think it should matter which house on Charlotte Terrace you're trying to get to, but you'd be wrong.

If you're heading for house #1, you'll take a right at the end of your street, and drive through Las Vegas, Denver, and Iowa. To get to house #2, take a left, drive through Phoenix, Albuquerque, and St. Louis.

Both trips will take the same amount of time (1 day and 18 hours), but route #1 is 29 miles longer (2,839 vs 2,810 for route #2).

Next time you get directions from Google Maps, try dragging the blue route line or the start/finish icons; the map will dynamically adjust your route and tell you how long and how far as you drag.

IV x V : color

These two updates are from the roadtrip, with the tachihara wooden camera. I'm not convinced yet that I'm very good at scanning color neg film. You are encouraged to click on the small pictures you see now in order to see bigger of the same.

Morro Bay, California. This picture, of all I've shot on the 4x5 so far, comes closest both to how I imagined the photo when I saw the scene & framed the shot, and to the kind of photos I'd like to keep making. Kind of landscapey, but definitely not a nature shot, a little mysterious, but tack sharp and full of detail. Imagine it about five feet high and mounted to an aluminum sheet.

Weird color cast and falloff, right? Not sure, but I think there might be a light leak somewhere in my operation. This the side of a train in Newport, Washington, on the Idaho border. Actually, you can see the same car in the background of this shot.

In or around Roy, New Mexico.

IV x V : black and white

Aspens in the Grand Canyon National Park.

Mark and Jackie, or, "Return of the Prodigal Son, Warrenton, VA, 1866". I figure if you're going to add hats, jackets, and canes, you might as well go all the way and digitally sepia-tone the damn thing. Funny story about this one: the neg (in its paper sleeve) sat in a ziplock full of melted icewater for the better part of a day, getting all wrinkled, and then dried out, and then processed a month later, not much worse for the wear.

Meg and Devin, my hosts in Houston.

just when I thought that I was out

they pull me back in

Miss Sarah Hughes, noted playwright

Warmups for The Savannah Theater Project's gala

tiny, happy pictures

I learned how to get pictures off of (and on to) my phone! It's really easy, especially if you have a mac and Bluetooth on both devices. You can download every cellphone pic you've taken, and you can even upload whatever jpg you want and make it your phone's wallpaper. Here's a sampling of phonepix:

Don't do meth, or your sense of billboard design will gown down the tubes. Townsend, Montana.
Cellphone macro:
There are two basic ways to get from New Hampshire to Massachusetts, and I usually pick the way that goes by this overpass:
This is what mid-April looks like in New Hampshire:
No relation :-(
Also no relation.... yet?
Thrift store in Las Vegas....
...and some of the clothes I tried on there:

that dang ol' Joe Bug

on the ball in Central Park, Manhattan, New York.
Shortly after Bug took this picture of me, I haggled with an itinerant Bengali beverage merchant for two frosty, newspaper-wrapped cans of Milwaukee's Best Light, which were a steal at $5 for the pair. Cheers to the free market!

Oh, and there are some honest blog updates in the offing, including some 4x5 from the road trip as well as a photographic ode to my truelove, the one who made the journey so special.