Hello everyone.

Time to do some catchup (not catsup, or ketchup). Thursday before last I was feverishly packing for a business trip and photo opportunity. I was headed, or so I thought, to Windsor England and had tacked a couple of extra days on the front end of the trip to do some photo shooting. I knew the trip would be iffy, due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland; but my flights had not yet been cancelled . So I painstakingly focused myself on arranging photo equipment, business presentation materials, and clothing, between check-in and carry-on bags. Clothing, cables and cords, non-confidential documents, extra reading material, and non-essential toiletries went in the checked luggage. Personal 17″ laptop, business 15″ laptop, primary reading material, 3 days of medications, 1 unit each of underwear-shirt-socks, power converters, G11 point-and-shoot, passport, PowerPoint slide printouts , thumbdrives, and various travelling office supplies went in the backpack. Canon 40D, 18-200mm IS lens, 1.4x teleconverter, 50mm f/1.8 lens, and assorted hoods, tabletop Manfrotto tripod, and various memory cards, filters, and lens shades, were stowed away in the ThinkTank Urban Disguise 60.   Mental checklists were checked and double-checked.  All batteries were charged, chargers packed, memory cards formatted, and essential equipment triple-checked.  I was ready to roll and excited to be going back to Europe– man, I needed a new shoot to get stoked!

Next day, first thing, flight cancelled.   Let the travel agency dance begin.   All day, back-and-forth with the travel agent (Laura, she’s a champ!).  Hours went by with little hope.  Finally, an itinerary comes through e-mail.   Nashville to Detroit, then on to Riga, Latvia via Air Kuzbekistan, then Riga to Tegel airport in Berlin, and on to Heathrow.  Cancelled.  Next up, Nashville to JFK to Barcelona to Milan to Heathrow.  Phone call 3:30 AM Saturday– cancelled.

Yeah, you guessed it.  Trip never happened.  The missed business meetings manifested themselves into about 7 hours of webexes set over a couple of days starting at 6:00 am.  No foreign photo ops, just several days of being at the office at 5:00 am– lovely. 

So, at least I grabbed a few early morning shots during my walks from the train to the office.  Could be worse, I did benefit from the nice early morning light.  Hence the shots below (taken with the G11 point-and-shoot).

Until next,

Dwight