I love a good used book store. It probably goes back to my childhood: Mom and I clocked a few hundred hours in The Book Swap (across from Richland Plaza shopping center, but now long gone, so long gone in fact that the place where it used to be just looks like a vacant lot) when I was young, and we’ve continued regular visits to bookstores ever since, pretty much every time we get together.

About six months after she moved up to Arkansas, she started talking up the Dickson Street Bookshop. I’d been hoping to go, but this was the first chance we had to visit. And not only Dickson Street, but we also popped into the Friends of the Fayetteville Public Library’s bookstore and Once Upon a Time‘s physical store… apparently, it used to be inside their warehouse, but they recently moved to a standalone building down the road: I’m sorry I missed that! Anyway, on to the pictures… Continue reading “Arkansas 4: Bookstores!”

Mom has a nice house in a tiny community on top of a mountain on the outskirts of Eureka Springs. Her view is beautiful, Glory be to God, and with the unusually late fall color—trees are usually bare by this time of the year: hooray for climate change, I guess—I got rather snap-happy. Continue reading “Arkansas 2: at Mom’s”

I had some vacation time eating a hole in my timesheet and to maximize it, I took off November 17-23. Thursday-Wednesday may seem like an odd choice, perhaps, but add in the Thanksgiving holiday (November 24 and 25 this year) and I got 11 days for the price of 5… I spent the first 4 days on a road trip to Arkansas to visit Mom and take some pictures, came home, developed most of them, and then she drove down to Wednesday spend Thanksgiving with us, so I got to spend nearly a week with my mom! It was great!

In the first 4 days, shot 9 rolls and 10 sheets of film and over 700 with the X70 and iPhone: entirely too much, really. (More on that later, perhaps.) From the film shots—I haven’t even looked at the digital stuff yet—I selected maybe 80 to share (also entirely too much), and I’ll be dribbling them out over the next hour or so, God willing. Part of my plan, maybe my only plan, was to shoot readily available consumer films to test and see how they handled and what sorts of characteristics they have during and after development and processing.

tl;dr: both performed admirably. I may have further comments as I go.

For now, let’s get this road trip started! Continue reading “Driving to Arkansas”