Lachlan717 wrote:Alastair Moore wrote:So as a result of the ensued chaos at Sydney airport this morning, I arrived I'm Albury with my camera and film but no camera bag. I'm now lens, meter, tripod and everything else related-less. They did assure me it'll be on the next flight but it's annoying all the same. Anyway, cross fingers it turns up or I'm not going to be very happy.
Name names!! Who did you fly with? Q Link?
A flight that I took on Wednesday was 90 minutes late departing (Jetstar, Mel-Syd), and then the Dash 8 that I boarded at Syd shat its hydraulics, rendering it useless, meaning a replacement plane was needed (Q Link, Syd-Tam). Add another 90 minutes to the Tamworth flight. Luckily, the return flights were better.
I guess that I shouldn't complain. It beats digging ditches, and it certainly beat the situation the bloke I had to meet with was in...
Virgin Australia. To give them some dues, it wasn't entirely their fault. It was absolute chaos at Sydney airport - the baggage machines had packed in and so I guess they had to manually shift bags from the pile of mixed bags stacking up in the check-in area to their appropriate plane. Deep down, I knew there would be problems and when a total of four bags appeared in the baggage collection area, I let out a bit of a chuckle.
My camera bag eventually appeared in Beechworth by Saturday lunchtime so it wasn't an entire disaster. Got a few shots on Saturday, a couple today until a weak moment (it was 35+ in Beechworth) where I took my eyes off the camera and a brief gust of wind blew my camera over into the creek I was shooting. Not total disaster though - it was only shallow and my camera doesn't run off batteries so leaving it out in the sun briefly to dry and it's fine.
The weekend was great, I really enjoyed it. There were a good mix of people with different abilities, I finally got to meet Shane (smbooth) off this very forum. Much alcohol was consumed and we had some great discussions. Saturday morning, we did a print "show and tell" and there was some superb work. I think I was one of the few hybrid (analog film and digital print) process people there, most people were wet printers, which I'm sure Maris will be happy to hear! I had to show and tell my prints, which I was a bit nervous about due to a. never showing anyone my prints as a general rule and b. feeling a bit intimidated by the prints that had been shown before (they were very, very good). But it wasn't a critique session so no direct feedback although David Tatnall gave me a nod of approval and told me he thought my digital prints were very good saying he thought it was rare to see high quality digital prints, so that was great good to hear.
I think I've captured a couple of good shots from this weekend but will see when they go through the developer tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing how they turned out. No reason why they shouldn't do, of course, but there's always the opportunity to balls-up the developing!
Anyway, it was a really good weekend and nice to be surrounded and inspired by other large format photographers. There are plans to run this event again at the start of September so I'll plan to go again and will re-think my camera bag transportation.