Michael Blake and I have and will be working on some musical creations this Fall and Winter, I’m excited for where they may take us. We’ll do our best not so sound like singer/songwriters.

Laura and I hooked up with Tom Lehman & Co. for some outdoor enjoyment in early August when she was visiting from Nashville for a few weeks. We’d wanted to do some camping while she was here and I was finally able to simply take a day off work to accomplish the necessary freedom of time to spend some of it in the wilderness.

The afore-mentioned Tom happened to be camping that same weekend and invited us to enjoy with his crew what is quite possibly the most amazing camping spot I’ve ever seen. The view of the Hood River valley and Mt. Hood itself was amazing, and enjoying the weekend with friends and especially with Laura was perfect.

My void of words was well filled by Harold’s over abundance of words, and I enjoyed an extended lunch break packed as full as it could get with every bit of information that exists on the topic of the era and style of cameras I was there to inquire about. Harold seems to know more about the brands and technology and intricacies of these cameras than the whole Internet.

I’m in the market lately for the father of professional Canon SLRs, so I’m looking for the right Canon F-1 to join my family, though I’m also open to the idea of the iconic Nikon F or the less-vintage Canon F-1n or EF. Too many options, and in reality, Harold didn’t make my search any easier because my visit to his home today put them all at my fingertips. I’ll figure it out soon enough, however. Enjoy this eyecandy:

Jumping back into European traveling mode only six months after our last trip was rather easy and automatic, though I hadn’t planned on making it back overseas so soon. We were rushed, of course, in getting to Amsterdam as soon as possible in order to catch up with the sequence of the final three shows of the tour, Cologne, Germany, Berlin, and Brussels Belgium. This time we wouldn’t be spending the majority of the time with only each other as we did last year. Instead, Odessa Jorgensen and Gill Landry, close friends of Laura’s would be doing much of the traveling along side us.

This time around we weren’t able to write the daily blog posts as we did last May, but we were able to do as much shooting. I’ve yet to finish getting my photos from the first trip processed and scanned due to a busy summer, but this time a round its actually been much quicker. Here are a few I shot of Laura and Odessa in Brugge and Berlin, respectively:

Laura Elizabeth Dart by Amos Lanka (amoslanka on flickr) Hasselblad 500c/m
Zeiss Planar 80mm
Kodak Portra 400nc

Odessa Rose Jorgenson by Amos Lanka (amoslanka on flickr) Hasselblad 500c/m
Zeiss Planar 80mm
Kodak Portra 400nc

I’ll have more to share soon, including some of the concert and behind the scenes photos, though the best of those will be held until November for publication in print. If such things interests you, please keep track of Drt & Ink, my collaboration with Laura at our new site, drtandink.com and the blog at drtandink.com/blog.

With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk–thy unloos’d hurricanes,
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears–a lack from all
eternity in thy content,
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee
greatest–no less could make thee,)
Thy lonely state–something thou ever seek’st and seek’st, yet
never gain’st,
Surely some right withheld–some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of
freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those breakers,
By lengthen’d swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
And undertones of distant lion roar,
(Sounding, appealing to the sky’s deaf ear–but now, rapport for once,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
The first and last confession of the globe,
Outsurging, muttering from thy soul’s abysms,
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.
- Walt Whitman

Literally.

Canon AE-1 35mm
Kodak Portra 400nc
Stapleton, Nebraska

Officially today at StruckAxiom we’ve launched a site for quite possibly the hardest client to satisfy, ourselves. StruckAxiom.com has gone live and I’m extremely excited about the new branding (developed after Struck merged with Axiom) and the new site. Working at Struck so far has been challenging and exciting in terms of the ability to push into new areas and curiosities, and I’m very happy to be a part of it.

As for the future, besides working for a top-notch agency, I’ve got more ventures than ever, including a lot of rethinking of my own blog and website (new designs coming soon) and the collaborative site, blog, and life that Laura and I are beginning. Trying to find a way to fit it all in, including another trip to Europe on Sunday.