Words and Light

I am back in Central Time, meaning it is 1:38 a.m. in Columbia, Mo. My bed is still unmade, my bags are still packed and I have to be ready for a Jefferson City shift in about nine hours, but I can’t sleep because:

• I’m thinking about just how much I have to get done this week,
• I’m reflecting on how incredible this past week was,
• I feel like going to sleep means completely closing the door on this past week and forcing myself to resume life as a student and reporter,
• and I need to correct a few things from the previous blog post.

The biggest thing I need to correct is the mileage. I originally said we put about 3,000 miles on Esten’s CR-V this trip. His spring break odometer actually reads 4,040 miles. Granted, some of that is from his camping trip the weekend immediately prior our roadtrip, but certainly at least 3,700 miles of that are from our adventuring out West.

Another minor correction: yet another attraction we didn’t get to check out was the Petrified Forest. And I probably spent more than $200, but I really don’t feel like adding up numbers from my on-line checking account.

Also, here are some more numbers, just for fun:

• I took 1,175 digital photos this trip.
• Of those, 371 are for HDR (high dynamic range) purposes. Hurrah for bracketing and, consequently, necessitating a lot of editing!
• Of the remaining 804 photos, 169 have survived the preliminary edit. Meaning, those 169 will be examined more closely, and those that survive the second edit will be toned/etc. From there, those that survive the third edit will appear on-line at some point.
• I shot three rolls of Fuji Superia 100 and nine exposures of a roll of Fuji 400. I can’t decide if I should try to use up the remaining 27 exposures on the 400 or if I should just get all four rolls developed so I can see how my film turned out.

So, um, yeah. I have a lot of editing to do. Especially in the HDR department, which should prove interesting since I’ve never edited HDR before.

Again — hopefully I’ll have some photos ready by this weekend. In the meantime, I just need to plow through all the schoolwork, reporting and cleaning I have to get done before I can start playing with photos.

Finally (and also in the meantime), I already miss the West. I already touched on this in the previous post, but damn. Driving through eastern Colorado, Kansas and half of Missouri en route to Columbia made me realize just how spectacular the West is.

I mean, I’ve been West before. I’ve spent three full summers and part of four other summers in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northeastern New Mexico (i.e., Philmont Scout Ranch). But everything I saw on this trip (exception: today’s drive) was something I’d never seen before. If only we had more than a week — and the funds — to truly explore the great American West.

Someday. Someday I’ll return.

But for now, as Davy Knowles sings in one of his songs, I’ve gotta roll away.