Plan…D?

It’s Friday, in three days I’m supposed to be boarding a flight at Manchester airport to then spend three months shooting a project in Canada… supposed to be. Ask anyone who knows me and they will confirm that I very rarely do exactly what I plan to do, this has always been a great source of amusement (and irritation, I suspect) to my now ex-wife, Helen. Helen gave-up writing my schedule in her diary a long time ago. Plans change, sometimes plans are changed for me through circumstance, other times I simply change my mind. This latest ‘new direction’, in my defence, isn’t entirely my fault.

A few people heard I was going to be in Canada and I was asked to run a number of one day photography workshops, paid work, but in the overall scheme of things it’s work that will only amount to about 5 out of 90 days in total. But it is paid work all the same, so I’ve had to apply for a working visa, and to cut a long story short – I can’t go to Canada until I have said visa and it’s going to take a few weeks.

What am I going to do in the meantime? Well my revised plan is to stay at home on the Isle of Man for an extra week and prepare my van for an epic road trip around Europe. There’s a lot of Europe that I haven’t seen – I want to see Germany. I have been through Germany, but you don’t get to see a lot of a place while you’re passing through on the autobahn at 100 mph. I’d also like to visit Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. After Northern Europe, and depending on the health of my van and my bank account, I’ll drive south to Southern Spain, via my parent house in France (to shower, mail film home and wash my clothes) to get a bit of Autumn sun.

I do have a project in mind that I’ll shoot while I’m away, the premise of which I shall not divulge for fear of jinxing it. I will only be shooting on film though, using two cameras – a Fuji GW690III and a Pentax 67 with 105mm and 55mm lenses. I’m just about to order 100 rolls of Kodak Portra 400 & 800 film, so if you go on Amazon today and discover there’s none in stock, anywhere, I’m afraid that was me…