Gadget’s Airstream Chronicles

This morning Sadira and I took a ride up to Sedona. The trip had several goals……

• Hike around Sedona and take a few more fun photos.
• Stop by Rollies Camera.
• New neck strap for me.
• New neck strap and camera bag for Sadira.
• Pop by Dead Horse and meet T.B. Rich.

Sorry to say, but the goals and objectives for the day didn’t quite work out. Sure, we made it to Sedona. And yes, we made it to Rollies Camera. We each picked up our items…..and that was about it. Oh, and a side trip to New Frontiers for a few goodies.  Included in the goodies…..1 lb of the baked / seared tofu I’d written about the other day.  That explains the photo of the tofu brick on the web site!

So, what went wrong? In a word….. Cottonwoods.

Apparently the cottonwoods are in full force over in Sedona now. I’ve suspected I have a problem with them based on prior experience, but I’ve never fully settled on, “Yeah, they’re a real problem.” I made the decision today, they are a problem!

In a matter of minutes walking the streets of Sedona I felt the need for my inhaler (in the truck of course). I kept track of how I was doing, and figured I could “go on” for a bit. By the time we returned to the truck I had pressure behind my eyes, I was coughing / choking a good bit, a whopping headache had set in, and I was pretty dizzy.

Ok, no hugging cottonwoods this week. Oh, soon they’ll be doing their thing here.

Fortunately the truck’s super duty air filter helped out pretty quick. Driving along we made the decision to skip Jerome and head right back to Prescott. Just being in the truck with the filter helped within 15 minutes. Hoorah! I am however slightly concerned about the cottonwoods popping up here soon.

It’s at this time I must say somebody only had 1 Zyrtec today instead of 2, no Flonaze, etc. If I had thought ahead I could have made the experience more tolerable. That’ll be addressed going forward for the next few weeks here. I’m happy to say, the major pollen season here is pretty quick. Also, I experienced the same thing here last year, but with an Airstream and Hepa, staying indoors for a bit, etc., things worked out well. Hey, if you find a place where you can tolerate the outdoor conditions 80% of the time you’ve done good.

By the time we returned to Prescott we both felt a lot better. Very telling for sure. Interesting how quickly I react when in the wrong environment.

I made the decision to keep it close to the Airstream for the rest of the day.  We took a short walk into the Dells, and then Sadira headed back home to play with her Dyson vacuum cleaner.  I stuck around the trailer, cranked up the Hepa, and decided to take a few more photos with my portable studio setup.  When you think you should stay in, find something fun to do.  Oh, and I cleaned the trailer prior to shooting of course.

One thing I wanted to photograph was my new “Life Is Good” hat.  If you look at it you might say, “Hey, that looks like Sedona on the hat!”  You would be correct, it is Sedona.  You want to know the really interesting thing?  You can only buy the Life Is Good Sedona hat at the Sedona store.  Pop in anywhere else in the world, you won’t find it.  Neat, right? 

And no, I didn’t set up my portable studio for shots of the hat alone.  I wanted to share photos of my tofu find (up above), and create some new product shots for an upcoming article, and use in another book I’m working on.  Ah, the busy life of a guy hiding from Cottonwoods……

I also thought I’d share a shot of today’s studio setup.  Bert got a kick out of my portable Airstream photo studio, and I get a kick out of it too.  No real space is lost to the equipment, and when I need to setup product shots or macros I sure have something slick to work with.

For all of today’s shots I used my 580 Speedlight, went to a fully manual setup, and actually under-exposed everything.  The strobe made up the difference, and in all honestly I could have under-exposed further in order to darken the background more.  The tofu shot shows too much reflection from my background, and I should have narrowed the aperture, lowered the flash power, and set the shutter speed higher.  Ah well, a learning process for sure.

Well, off to take Zyrtec # 2 for the day.  Still not at 100%, but much better here.  It’s a shame, the cottonwoods make it look like snow in the Spring, and I sure wouldn’t mind hiking in Sedona right now.  Ah well, they’ll finish up soon!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Arizona, Digital Cameras, Digital Photography, Notes from Gadget, Photo of the Day.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.