Watkins traveled with an entire support crew and mule train. He had his own dedicated rail car when doing work for them. But there were photographers on the frontier using far bigger cameras, who needed an entire scaffold built in advance to support them. Around the same time, early survey crews were climbing to the summits of some quite remote peaks. They leveled their early transits just with leg adjustments, just like my father taught me, and he was a surveyor for Grand Coulee Dam, and a supervisor for the Central Valley Project. And it had to be precise - way way more precise than anything a landscape photographer does. Tripod heads and modern self-leveling theodolites etc didn't exist. But bubble levels weren't some two buck toy bought on Amazon either.
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