Back from Egypt

Hi, I just returned from my trip to Egypt last night. I would like to share some of the experience with you.
I brought my speed graphic with four grafmatics and a hundred sheets of PL 100, and five film holders for Velvia 100.

I carried my film with me through all the check points, Chicago was the only one to do a hand inspection and the girl who looked at it wanted to open it, she got a superior and he was satisfied with looking at the black bag the film came in though he then swabbed all the boxes for chemical residue. London the film went through two scannings, no exceptions. At this point I gave up any notion of control. My film was scanned twice at each airport in Egypt, going to the different cities we visited; that is twice in each direction, once when you enter the airport and once before going to the gate.

I had planned to keep acurate records of all shots with my digital voice recorder transcribing it to paper in the evening. My first day out I threw everything out the window. There is a relentless crush of males trying to make a living by selling souvenirs or trying to get you to take their picture for a dollar. Using my spot meter the readings for the low to high numbers were 13 2/3 to 16. I metered a grey card, 14 2/3, I used that reading for my exposure rating the film at 50 iso. I set my speed to 1/25 @ f22 for most of my shots. I used a yellow or red filter for many of the shots where there was sky in the frame to separate it from the stone adjusting the exposure with the aperture. On the last day I had one shot left in a grafmatic and left it unexposed to develop it to see if there was any problem with all the scanning. I developed five of the sheets in that holder early this morning and can report no fogging on any of those five.

I welcome any questions or comments. If you have any ideas on development you would like to share, great. I print on Azo and realize these negatives may not work very well. I had a lot of fun. I met some wonderful people who were friendly and humorous. We are planning to go back again. I took some great shots, now if you could only see them in my mind. chris

Congrats on a safe and productive trip. I hope you'll be able to share some of your photos online soon.

My 68-year Mother just returned from Egypt too, and she and her friend were the only Americans on her tour, which meant she had a private guide for much of it. She had a safe and exciting trip too, although nobody informed her of the Jordanian Hotel bombings UNTIL after she left Egypt. While she could have been more curious and read the papers, the tourism people there downplay any risk or bad news. Things are well guarded however.

Did you use a tripod? How was photographing with LF there?

I brought a tripod and used it one day. Everything else was hand held. It is the high season, there are people everywhere and when they see you with an old camera it does draw some unwanted attention.