So I go aaaaaalllllllllllll the way to Rome and Venice with my handy-dandy 4x5 Polaroid conversion and 6x6, and lots a film, ready to shoot my heart out, and there isn't a gosh-darn cloud in the sky. Nothing but endless expanses of boring boring boring blue. Not even a whisp of condensation to add the slightest bit of depth or drama to photos. Landscape and building shots come back looking like merely some sort of soul-less gov't record. Red & yellow filter never got out.

Oh, wait, there are people to photograph, right? Lots of interesting people shots, right?

Not really, no. Just tourists. Tourists everywhere. Large tourists, with shorts and loud t-shirts with wild prints, getting in your shots, standing there oblivious to you, holding their digital cameras to their faces for 10-20 minutes for each shot as they frame and re-frame and fumble with the shutter button then check the image and do it again, and then of course they have to hand their camera to their friend who does the same..."Oh, sorry, where we in your way?" "Oh no, of course not. I just have nothing better to do that to look at you lot!"

Got a couple of decent shots of little kids....but wait, what's that in the background, ominously floating behind the cute' kid's head? Is that....the large, shorts-clad rear end of a tourist...

So I get back, and spend a few days walking around feeling dejected, and I accidentally look up and see what? Clouds! Large, dramatic, puffy, marsh-mellowy, gorgeous clouds! Thunderheads and all over the place, stretched out from one end of the big big sky to other...and I don't have a camera with me.