Edinburgh Waverley Station, Scotland

My wife and I were fortunate to be able to travel to the United Kingdom for several years in a row starting in 2003. We flew over on British Air on Thanksgiving Day and had a whole center row of seats to ourselves. With the plane only about one-third full, it made for a pleasant journey across the pond that is the Atlantic Ocean. We flew into Gatwick Airport outside London and immediately changed planes and flew to Edinburgh, Scotland.

I had visited Edinburgh back in 1971 as a sailor on a US submarine that had pulled into Faslane HMNB Clyde. A bunch of us took the train from the base to Edinburgh to see the sights and loved every minute of our day there. If memory serves, there was four or five of us in full dress blue uniforms and the locals could not have been nicer to us. I had always wanted to take Joyce back to Edinburgh to see the sights that I had been privileged to see.

I was still shooting film on that trip and was shooting only Kodak Tri-X b&w film. Since I wanted to be able to shoot with just one camera, I pushed the film from ASA400 to ASA1600. Shooting with a Nikon F100 which has a top shutter speed of 1/8000 of a second, I was able to vary my aperture to satisfy my wants and desires for a particular image as I wanted.

This image was shot of a flower vendor on the outside of the terminal. While the lens, a Tokina 24-200mm, was not the best of lenses, the wide angle capability suited this image quite well.

 I miss the days I had for both travel and work that got me out to shoot every day. With the pandemic, that effort was curtailed quite severely but the world has opened back up finally. While I have never really bought in to the whole "lockdown" scenario, hopefully the world is finally starting to turn. Let's just get back to the art of living!