• Hasselblad H3DII camera body
• 39 megapixel back
• HC 80mm f/2.8 lens with hood, front and rear caps
• HC 50mm-110mm f/3.5-f/4.5 lens with hood, front and rear caps, and soft drawstring carrying pouch
• one 13mm extension ring
• one 26mm extension ring
• two H3DII rechargeable batteries
• one “emergency” battery pack that accepts 3xCR123A’s
• battery charger
• Hasselblad camera strap
• A really long FW400 cable for tethering
• Pelican 1550 hard-sided, water-resistant case with inserts to carry and protect the whole kit
• original boxes and manuals for camera and lenses

I’m the 2nd owner of the kit. I’ve babied it, and quite frankly barely used it. The previous owner took amazing care of it as well. Everything is in excellent condition, functions perfectly, and is cosmetically nearly flawless (a couple scuffs on the lens 50-110 lens cap, and a couple wear marks where a tripod quick-release was attached to the camera base. That’s literally all I could find).

Buy it. Baby it. And go make some huge-ass photos. Your spouse will forgive you.

If you’re interested, shoot and email to doug (that’s me!) at dougboutwell.com.

Anyway, I thought they deserved a proper, permanent home on the web :)

This project was inspired by thinking about doing things differently.  There’s nothing inevitable about the way most wedding photographers approach shooting a wedding.  The “bag of tricks” that they use to shoot weddings works, but it’s not the only way.  So my mind has been spinning for years with “what-ifs”.  What if we didn’t shoot 3000+ frames?  What if it was all black and white?  What if we didn’t pose anything or interfere in any way?  What if we posed EVERYTHING?  What if we lit everything?  No flash?  All flash?  What if it was all on Polaroid?  A Leica?  What if we shot it all on 8×10?  The interesting part of asking those questions, of course, isn’t just to ramble about what gear we could find an excuse to buy, or how we could make the job easier.  The point is to think more deeply about WHY we do things the way we do, and whether habits honed over years can be challenged to improve the craft of wedding photography.  It’s a journey to refine the definition of what wedding photography is about, and an attempt to explore the question of what’s useful and important.  That line of questioning can take you many different places, and last weekend, it took me to Anaheim Hills with a vintage Deardorff and an excitement for doing something new.

I’ve always liked the idea of shooting a wedding on 8×10 film – mostly because I just like 8×10.  Sometimes I wonder whether I like the idea of it more than the actual result and process, but nevertheless the view camera is always the devil whispering on my shoulder.  It’s challenging and impractical, but exceptionally rewarding when you can put the medium to use doing what it’s best at.  What view cameras are good at is taking beautiful photos of things that aren’t moving around.  At a wedding, that pretty much means scene-setting shots, and portraits.  So why not just shoot that?  Throw out the documentary aspect altogether.  Anti-documentary.

It seemed like a sensible thing to do.  After all, for the people that were there, years down the road, photos of the people and the places are enough to jog your memory.  The most valuable thing seems to me to create a record of the family at that moment in time.  The candids are nice, but sometimes they seem like superfluous snapshots in their casual haste.  It’s almost crass, in a way, to have 10,000 photos of every last moment of the day, in the same way that unedited video is boring to watch, and wedding video often is much less magical than the photography.  Less is more.  Sometimes just having a few amazing images as mental anchors lets your mind reconstruct the rest.  It allows the viewer to fill in the blanks with the fantasy.

So the idea, then, was see what a wedding would look like if I didn’t shoot anything that actually happened, but rather just shot some formal portraits and took some photos of the surroundings.  Instead of trying to construct some Universal Representation of The Truth™, just shoot a limited set of images and let the viewer’s mind fill in the rest.  As an artist, I liked that idea, because great art always meets the viewer in the middle.

8×10 seemed like a natural medium to use for this project then, because it played to the strengths of large format photography, instead of trying to fight them.  8×10 in particular can be unapologetically romantic in its dreamlike rendition of space (see the work of some of my heroes – Paolo Roversi and Sally Mann).  Focus, detail, and tones can swirl and dance around in mysterious and beautiful ways that no other format does quite as well.  8×10 images can be at once firmly specific and alluringly incomplete in the information they give us, and I’ve always thought it would be a great medium to shoot a wedding…

… except for the fact that it’s not.  Despite hustling around on an unseasonably warm day, I still managed to only shoot a total of 29 frames of B&W and 5 frames of color film.  I own 11 film holders, each of which holds 2 sheets of film.  I loaded 8 with B&W (for the portraits), and 3 with color (for everything else).  That means 16 portraits before having to go reload, which took about 40 minutes using a jumbo changing bag in the back of my car.  I had hoped to shoot many, many more photos of the guests and family, but 8×10 is too damned slow to shoot all that many photos in one day, especially when you’re trying to fit your shooting around an actual wedding, and not take time away from the hired wedding photographer (thanks Hugh!  You’re awesome!)  I was hoping for lots and lots of portraits, but after shooting each of the bridesmaids individually, I realized that was just folly.  And that’s even though I only shot one frame of each of them.

So even though I was only trying to shoot portraits and places, I still managed to do a fraction of the shooting I had hoped.  That’s the fault of the medium.  8×10 is horrifyingly slow when you’re used to 500 raw images on a CF card and 5fps capture rates.

And then there’s the post-production.  Developing large format film is either expensive or time consuming… sometimes both.  I did the developing myself, and in an attempt to get it all done in hours instead of days, ended up scratching the negs a bit.  Good thing we have scanners and Photoshop!  Speaking of – scanning 8×10 is slow, and it’s a pain in the ass as well (dust, newton rings, scratches… bah!)  I’ll take digital any day in terms of post-production.

So, having gone through the process, I can say that I’ve truly gotten that out of my system :)  I have to say that, in terms of the “experiment” I was doing, 8×10 is a beautiful medium for wedding portraits, but I think medium format would have done almost as good a job for a fraction of the hassle (with the added benefit that you can actually shoot things that are moving around).  I can’t say I’d ever do 8×10 at a wedding again, but every time I’ve looked at these images over the last few days, I’m glad I did… just once.  There’s just something special about big film, and I hope photographers continue to find excuses to do things the hard way until they stop making the stuff.  Different can be SO fun.

Thanks Nick and Kate for letting me come to their wedding to make art.  You guys were remarkably cool, your wedding was beautiful, and I hope you have an amazing life together!

Special thanks to Hugh Forte, who was the “real” photographer, for letting me be the worst Uncle Bob ever.  You kick ass, but my camera is still totally bigger than yours :)

PS – I still need to unload the color film and send it off for processing, but I’m pretty sure that these are going to be the most interesting of the group.  I’ll post the color stuff when I get it back, probably in a few weeks.

All of that is prelude to saying that I spent my birthday this week flying to Baker, CA to have a milkshake at the Mad Greek.  It was an awesome time, and served as further proof that the journey is often the whole point, and to hell with the destination.  Baker is a tiny town off I-15, in the middle of the desert, that most people know only from passing it on the way to Vegas.  There’s a giant thermometer that can be read from miles away, and that often reads in the triple digits (Baker is literally hotter than hell most days).

Baker also has a tiny airport, which is a generous word to use.  It would be more accurate to say that Baker has a runway.  3300′ long or so, and 50′ wide, which is basically separated from the neighboring highway by about 100′ and a chainlink fence.  You could literally just drive off the road and onto the runway and nobody would notice or care.  At least there’s a wind sock and some parking.  The runway was also in surprisingly nice shape (compared to, say, SAS at the Salton Sea).  The airport’s call sign even screams out obscurity.  Orange County is SNA (Santa Ana).  Los Angeles International is LAX.  Baker is 002.  Naturally, I’ve wanted to fly there ever since I saw the little blip on the Los Angeles chart:

Baker on an aeronautical chart. No other airports for miles and miles in any direction.

Having only a few hours to fly, it seemed like the right day to finally make the trip, so I took off from Corona and enjoyed a calm, cool, beautiful flight to Baker, a 2 mile walk to town for a milkshake, and an easy flight home.  I also got a chance to finally play with Hipstamatic a bit, and I can see why people are hooked.  It’s not perfect, but it does make photography on the iPhone a bit more casual, and at least gives the images some character (maybe a bit too much, but it’s something).

By the way… it was a peanut butter milkshake.  And it was delicious.

I’m super late to the party, because… well, trying to wrangle 2 kids and run a business hasn’t left me with much time for blogging.  And then Chenin got to it first, so I let it slide a while. And then the amazingly talented Carrie and Brittany photographed her, and they are way better at shooting babies, so I considered the bases covered.  Now Scout’s almost a month old, and I haven’t written a proper welcome for her on my blog (which makes me a terrible father, or a terrible photographer… or both).

So here’s a very belated welcome to my beautiful baby daughter, whose big blue eyes absolutely melt me, and whose delicate, perfect little fingers and toes fill me with wonder and awe (even at 3am).

The first time Max met his baby sister, he immediately burst into tears.  I think it was the realization that from that moment onward, it wasn’t all about him anymore.  Either that or he thinks babies are spooky looking.

But he changed his mind relatively quickly, and got some bonding time in with grandpa and his new baby sis.

And then, fast forward to yesterday – we got the kids all dressed up and dragged them over to get their photos with Santa.  It was after seeing my little daughter all dressed up that I realized there’s no real excuse for not taking as many photos of my kids as possible.  I might be mostly a software company executive nowadays, but time is unforgiving, and they really do grow up so damned fast.  Not being in the daily groove of shooting photos makes it hard to remember to shoot my own kids, and that’s a near tragedy.  So I’m resolving to remind myself to stop and snap a photo here and there (of course, Chenin shot both of these, but that’s just because she happened to be the first to grab the fancy camera.)

Her little mary janes are just about the cutest thing ever.

So Happy Birthday Scout!  I can’t believe you’re almost a month old!  Here’s to a thousand more happy memories with your loving family.

I have several ideas kicking around in my head, and I’d like to let them out.  These are ideas about wedding photography that have been germinating since back when I was shooting professionally.  In 2011, I’d like to make them happen.  I’m looking for a handful of couples getting married in 2011, who will let me create some art on their wedding day.  Here’s the deal:

1. I’ll shoot for free.  I’m not aiming to make money, just to make some images that I can be proud of, and since I don’t know if the ideas will work out, I’m not comfortable charging money anyway.  This is strictly experimental.  So I’ll cover the cost of materials, travel, assistants, etc.
2. You’ll get a digital copy of my final product, with the right to reproduce the images for personal use.  I may or may not actually print anything, but you’ll certainly get a copy of the retouched final images (though there may only be a few).
3. You’ll still need to hire a wedding photographer.  I’m going to be treading down a new path with some of these concepts, and I can’t guarantee that anything good will result at all.  I’m pretty confident I can make the photos I want, but I’m not 100% sure that they’ll be an adequate substitute for real, professional wedding photography.  So you’ll need to have someone there to do the “real” wedding photography.
4. California would be great, but I’ll travel for the right wedding.  In order to make this work, I need the right couples at the right venues.  If that’s in my neighborhood, great!  But I’m more committed to making the best images possible, so if you’re really interested, and you live far away, contact me anyway.

If you’re interested, (see update above) drop me a line with some details about yourself and your wedding.  We’ll talk a bit about what I have in mind, and if we connect, you just might end up with some amazing, unexpected mementos of your wedding.

My Amazing Wife is almost through with her second tour of duty as an expectant mother.  This time, she’s not only is finishing out her wedding season, shooting well into her 8th month, but also watching our rowdy little toddler when she’s not working.  Here she is yesterday, looking radiant in front of a passing storm.  Metaphorically, the storm that just kicked southern California’s ass seems to be clearing just as things get easier for her (her last wedding of the season is this weekend, and she’ll be 37 weeks pregnant with our daughter, Scout), so this portrait of her is a fitting depiction of Chenin at a turning point in her life.

I’m so proud of you, love!  Thanks for being a living example of just how tough women can be!

]]> http://www.dougboutwell.com/scouts-hour-is-nigh-upon-us/feed/ 4 http://www.dougboutwell.com/internet-courage/ http://www.dougboutwell.com/internet-courage/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 23:49:22 +0000 Doug Boutwell http://dougboutwell.com/?p=477 Yesterday I became bothered enough about a trend in the photo community to sit down and write some thoughts about it.  I know that by even getting two sentences into this article, I’ve already let the terrorists win, but like James Hetfield says: “Fight fire with fire.”

Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere have their own special breed of thugs and vandals.  Personas that exist solely for the purpose of intimidating, ridiculing, and generally tearing down anybody who dares to step into the spotlight.  I’m sure that, privately, these people fancy themselves as some sort of guerilla fighters, striking out from the underground to save the common people from an oppressive elite.  They see the Jasmine Stars and Dane Sanders of the world as egomaniacal parasites that feed on the naive.  These self-styled warriors of freedom and truth spend their time taking pot-shots from behind anonymous online personas, sparing no opportunity to ridicule and slander industry leaders.

Sure, at first, the pointed barbs and cynical jabs were funny, and maybe even on point.  We all could use a bit of sarcasm to blow off steam now and again.  Anyone that knows me well knows that I can rant and bitch about the world as well as anyone.  But at a certain point it begins to represent the kind of negative worldview that makes you, literally, a loser.  If all you see are problems, and all our heroes are your villains, it has a tendency to drag you down.  Devoting an entire website or Twitter account to burning shit down isn’t just depressing, it’s dysfunctional.  Time you spend wallowing in bitterness, anger, and self-pity is time that you’re NOT spending doing something productive.

To be more succinct – toddlers cry and hit things when they don’t like the way the world is working (trust me, I have one).  Adults, by contrast, figure out how to fix it.  They get up off their asses and work at making the world a better place.  If all you do is bitch and moan, you’re basically a two-year-old.

Of course, no REAL people spend 100% of their time complaining, or they wouldn’t have any friends.  The fact that people don’t want to hang out with adults that are emotional children is what keeps us from saying everything that pops into our heads.  That filter is an important social construct.  But online, with relative anonymity, that social pressure is removed.  Most of us still behave like adults, but some of us let our inner toddler out, and start peeing in the pool and biting other people’s ears, knowing that there won’t be any consequences.  It’s kinda cute the first time your kid throws a fit.  After that, it’s grating and exhausting.  For me, endless stream of cynicism is long past the point of being cute.

Furthermore, the real way to build a better world is not to concentrate all your energy on tearing it down.  If you’re angry, channel that anger into something positive.  If you don’t like the way the photo industry looks, take positive steps to make it better.  Shine the spotlight on people who you think deserve it, instead of trying to break the damned spotlight.  Tell us how things should be, instead of focusing on how they shouldn’t be.  Champion things that work, instead of ridiculing the things that don’t.  That’s how our leaders got to where they are.  If you don’t like them, then be better at showing us how to do it.  There’s no use talking about the problem unless you talk about the solution.

Yes, dialog needs to happen.  When industry leaders step out of line, we DO have a responsibility to call them on it.  When the emperor is naked, we should absolutely tell them so.  Someone needs to be checking the kool-aid before we all drink it.  But it’s a slippery slope to do so anonymously because it’s too easy to turn into a negative asshole.  No one is there to give you a time-out when you take it too far.  But if you have something to say, if you’re truly a champion of The Truth™, then you should be proud to own your words and thoughts.  If you have to say it anonymously, then you probably know you shouldn’t be saying it.  And if someone can’t be bothered to stand behind what they’re saying, I can’t imagine why anyone would give them any credibility.

So I’m officially calling out all the anonymous cynics on the interwebs, both in and out of the photo world.  Stop behaving like children.  If you have something important to say, then say it and stand behind it.  Otherwise, STFU and GTFO.  And by the way, your diaper could use a change.

The hotel in Guerrero Negro. We sent this photo to our wives back home to let them know we weren't dead or tied up in the back of a 1989 Chevy.

We woke up on the morning of the 18th, grabbed some coffee, hopped in a cab, and headed back to the airport.  A regional flight at the airport was boarding when we arrived, on a mid-sized twin-turboprop plane.  Those are the kind of planes that most travelers, who are accustomed to 737′s and Airbus 320s get scared of when they board one in Fiji or whatever.  This was most people’s version of a “small plane,” and when they get back home from a trip where they flew on one, they inevitably tell their friends how they had to take this tiny little deathtrap of a plane and they were so scared.  The plane we were flying was literally 1/4 the size of the plane people were boarding, or even smaller.  Size is all a matter of perspective.  Anyway, I digress…

We had a bit of a hard time convincing the uniformed soldiers, who were busy inspecting bags for the boarding flight, that we were getting on the little plane over there, and that we shouldn’t be standing in line for a commercial flight.  Security, by the way, consisted of a wooden table between the parking lot and the airplane, where men with rifles opened your bag and dug through it.  You could literally throw a rock from the dirt parking lot and hit our plane parked on the ramp.  There were no metal detectors, no x-ray machines, or any other of the security apparatus that people are used to in the post-9/11 US… which I suppose is all fine when you have men with assault rifles opening up your bags.  The whole process took place outdoors, in the slightly chilly morning breeze of the Pacific ocean, and I couldn’t help but think that I’d MUCH prefer having to go through this kind of security process than being herded like cattle through narrow lines and giant machines.  At least we had fresh air.  If we could just all stand next to the plane, and let some guys with guns dig through our bags, I’d almost feel less violated than the system that’s evolved in the US.

So we get out to the plane, and do our pre-flight inspection.  I discover that the plane only has 8, maybe 8 1/2 quarts of oil.  The POH (Pilot Operating Handbook) says not to take off with less than 9 quarts.  In my haste to get in the air at Corona, I didn’t bother to make sure that we had a couple extra quarts in the plane, which meant that we had to try and find aviation-grade oil at an airfield that didn’t even have fuel.  Crap.  So we walk back over to the soldiers, and try to explain what’s happening.  They go get the guy in charge, since he speaks a bit more English, and he tells us we’re out of luck, basically.  We’re pretty sure he doesn’t understand what we’re saying, as his English is only slightly better than our Spanish, but it looked like he was in charge of the military unit there, so I didn’t want to push our luck.  I think we were asking for fuel in Spanish, but I didn’t know how to ask for engine oil, and the stupid iPhone app I had bought to translate English to Spanish required an internet connection.  Data roaming was $20 per megabyte.  Fail.  I should have stuck with plan A and bought an actual book.

Good luck trying to find aviation oil HERE. They don't even have fuel, or at least they don't have fuel for people who only know a combined 50 or so words of Spanish.

We notice a couple of guys hanging out at the other end of the airport, near a hangar.  So we go ask them about oil, and they go get a pilot named Victor, who is very friendly, and speaks English quite fluently.  Compared to everyone else we’ve met in Guerrero Negro, Victor seems strangely… I dunno – worldly.  He’s wearing a black v-neck sweater over a white dress shirt, neatly pressed gray slacks, and shiny black leather shoes.  He’s not the guy in charge, officially, but you get the impression that everyone there knows him and looks up to him.  He’s like a pilot from back in the days where kids would get to go in the cockpit of an airplane and get little plastic wings, and the captain was a larger than life figure who’d been everywhere and done the kind of things you’d write a novel about, but to them it was no big deal and all part of a day’s work.  A skinnier, younger version of that guy from the Dos XX commercial, in a way.  Victor had his shit together.  Victor would help us out.

And help he did.  After explaining the situation, Victor said that the military had a Cessna 182 based on the field, and they probably had a few quarts of oil (seriously – Mexico’s military has one plane here and it’s the same model of plane that WE’RE flying?)  Victor went back over to the uniformed honcho that we were talking to earlier, clarified things a bit, and informed us that they could spare exactly one quart, and it would cost us $10.  It’s not exactly the same grade that the POH calls for, but after a quick Google search on my iPhone, which probably cost me 5 bucks in data roaming fees, I convinced myself that it was fine, and we poured our precious quart of oil into the engine.  Preflight complete, we started the plane, taxied over to the runway, and took off.

There was another low, overcast layer of clouds that morning, so we cruised below them at 1000 feet, looking for a hole to fly through so we could get up above them.  Navigating a plane through an unpopulated area from that altitude is tough.  You aren’t really high enough to have much of a view, so landmarks aren’t as obvious, and keeping a handle on where you are isn’t easy, as there aren’t many landmarks to begin with.  The road we were supposed to be following was quickly lost to the East, and my certainty about our position on the chart was eroding with every passing mile.  I was a bit nervous, but since we were following a line that was pretty near the curve of the Pacific coastline, I figured we could always turn West and intercept the coast.

It was then that I noticed several thin streaks of oil threading their way up my windshield.  Light, clear, new oil.  I looked over the instruments at the cowling and found that it was coming from the door that covered the oil fill tube.  Oh shit.  I had forgotten to put the cap back on after adding that quart.  The single quart that we had managed to find, against the odds, at a tiny airfield in a foreign country, was now slowly being smeared by the wind against the front of our plane.  To make matters worse, I was even less certain of where we were than before.  I looked over at the engine gauges, and they were all in the green.  Oil pressure, oil temperature, and engine temperature all still seemed normal, but I had no idea how long that would last with oil burping out of the engine.  I decided that we should take advantage of a hole in the clouds to gain some altitude, because if you DO have trouble with the engine in a small plane, altitude is all you’ve got.  From 1000 feet, we wouldn’t have many options, but a few thousand feet of additional altitude would allow us to glide a few miles in our plane, and that could make a big difference.  So we climbed to 3500′ and tried to figure out what to do.  Even higher would have been better, but I didn’t want to climb too high because I had a hunch the engine wouldn’t like being run at full throttle for several minutes while it bled oil.

After consulting the chart, I determined that we were about halfway to our next checkpoint, which was a dirt strip still some 20 miles away.  Since I didn’t know exactly where we were, I only had a vague idea of how to get there, so I turned to a heading that I guessed would take us to the field, cheating a bit toward the West so that we would be more likely to hit the coast North of the airfield, instead of overshooting it to the South.  We flew onward, but unfortunately, the clouds were once again thickening beneath us as we neared the ocean, making it hard to spot landmarks, and even harder to keep tabs on a suitable place for an emergency landing.  The ground below was becoming dotted with vegetation, instead of being just sand and salt flats, which meant that we couldn’t just land anywhere if there were problems.

As we progressed onward, the glimpses of the ground that we could catch through the broken cloud layer revealed an increasingly rugged and rocky terrain.  The situation seemed dire indeed.  The oil patch on the windshield was getting larger and progressively darker.  In all likelihood, all the fresh oil we added had leaked back out, and we were starting to lose the 8 quarts we had started with.  The engine gauges were all still in the green, but that’s only a small comfort when your engine is puking black stuff onto the body of your plane.  It was at this point that I seriously started apologizing to Mark, in advance, for the inevitable fact that we were both going to die.  I was convinced that at any moment our engine would seize up.  I couldn’t see much of the ground below, due to the clouds, but what I did see convinced me that there was nothing but rocks and cactus for us to land on.  I was thinking that the odds were about 50-50 that I’d be trying to steer us as gently as possible into a boulder at 50 knots.  Any minute, now.  Mark was pretty calm and collected about the whole thing.  I was shitting bricks.  Despite all the different things they tell you when you’re training for your license, I had gotten into a very, very stupid situation, with three strikes against me.  1 – I was lost.  2 – I was flying a plane with a potentially disastrous mechanical problem.  And 3 – I had flown into marginal weather, which was making it difficult to cope with problems 1 and 2.  I was a cautionary tale.

Oil on the windshield. Maybe not the absolute LAST thing you'd like to see as the pilot of a small aircraft, but close.

Despite my white knuckled grip on the controls, the landscape continued to roll lazily along 3500′ below us, and the clouds began to break up.  Within a few minutes, we could see a bay in the distance, which, according to the chart, had a dirt airstrip beside it.  We could see a road beneath us again, and the ocean was now only a couple miles to our right.  We weren’t going to die after all!  We might be stranded in a fishing village halfway down the Baja peninsula, but that’s better than dead.  At least a road offers a flat place for you to land a plane in an emergency, and the possibility of someone driving by to help out.

As we approached the spot on the map where the airport was supposed to be, however, my skepticism returned.  There was nothing, and I mean nothing where the airfield was supposed to be.  Nothing that even resembled a runway, or even tire tracks.  Certainly no buildings or people, or even the faintest outline of a road.  It was just a salt flat, which wrapped around a small bay on the Pacific coast.  It looked hardened enough, but there was no way to be positive it wasn’t just soft, salty mud.  We could probably land safely, but after my last experience driving on mud beside a big body of water , I was pretty convinced that we wouldn’t be taking off afterward.  This was the first time I had seen an aeronautical chart give inaccurate information, but I figured it must be a fluke.  It’s Mexico, and they probably just don’t keep things updated on the same schedule that we do in the US.  Besides, it’s the only navigational information we’ve got.

So we decided to fly another 20 miles to the next airport on the chart, another dirt strip beside a small fishing village.  The oil patch continues to grow, but the gauges are still in the green.  Maybe engine failure isn’t imminent.  We make it to the next airport and, thank GOD, it’s actually there.  A dirt runway, but a runway nonetheless.  We’re going to be alright.  I start bringing us down to 1000′ AGL so we can check the condition of the runway and try and gauge the wind.  As we near the airfield, I notice several black lines running perpendicular to, and directly across the runway, spaced out about every 200-300 feet.  That’s odd, I thought… I’ve never seen runway markings on a dirt field, and certainly not running across the runway.  We continued our descent to the field, and when we were nearly over the runway, the black lines across the runway turned into a line of small circles.  They had placed goddamn TIRES across the runway to close it.  Not only did they want you to know it was closed, but they wanted to make sure that you’d shear the landing gear clean off your plane if you dared to touch down there.  I added power, retraced 10 degrees of flaps, and started climbing back out.  WHY the HELL would they do something like that?  It’s charted as a public airport with a dirt strip.  Pilots (like me, for instance!) might someday have an emergency, and they might count on being able to land there to save their bacon.  Closing the runway, in a manner that made a landing impossible, seemed not only rude, but just downright dangerous.

Well, we figured that we made it this far, so we may as well go another 50 or so miles to the next airport, at the next tiny fishing village.  Every time we climbed, it seemed that just a little more oil ended up on the windshield.  The streaks of oil had long since run all the way to the top of the windshield, and it was beginning to get hard to see from the pilot’s side.  In about 25 more minutes, we could see the next airport on the chart.  From the air, it was hard to tell which of the two stretches of narrow dirt was supposed to be the airport, but after flying one pass over the town at 1000′, we decided on the strip of dirt to the East, and squared up for an approach.  It was small and rough, but at least it didn’t have tires strewn across it…. but just as I was preparing to pull power and glide down to the runway, we noticed something worse.  The runway was small and rough, and dotted with… rocks.  Big ol’ rocks, about 12″ in diameter, dotting the runway.  They had blended in with the dirt from afar, but now that we were practically on the ground, they were very obvious, and looked hungry for some riveted aluminum.  Seriously?  Fucking ROCKS?!?  I was growing weary of surprises at this point.  Flying in Mexico had been charming and fun the day before, when I was cleared to land with a casual “Okie Dokie,” but the lack of standards, infrastructure, and communication here was anything but charming today.  I just wanted to land my damn plane before we ended up with every last quart of oil on our windshield.

I’ve heard, by definition, an insane person is someone who does the same thing over and over, but expects different results each time.  Therefore it was literally insane of us to expect the next two airports to be different, but flew toward them with genuine hope for a different result anyway.  15 minutes later, we had arrived.  Sure enough, one of the two strips had tires across it, and after making an approach on the second, we found the same kind of rocks strewn across the runway that had nearly taken the wheels off our plane before.

We tried to land at 5 different airfields. We were 5 times denied. If you're flying to Mexico, don't count on any of those dirt strips to be open.

At this point, we were only 30 minutes from a real, paved, international airport, with a control tower and everything.  We were starting to get used to the oil on the windshield at this point, and so even though we had to basically cross the entire Baja peninsula to get there, over mountains and rocky terrain, the flight to Loreto International barely warranted a 2 on the adrenaline-o-meter.  I didn’t have much worry left to give.  We landed at Loreto without much incident, taxied over for fuel, greeted the men with the rifles, and took stock of the situation.

By the time we finally landed, after nearly two hours of flight without an oil cap, the plane was a royal mess.

The plane was covered in oil streaks from nose to tail.  It was all over the engine cowling, on the undercarriage, seeping out from the cowl flaps, on the windshield, wings, and back window.  It was on the pilot’s door, in the door handle, and seeping out of the baggage door.  Oil on the landing gear, the wing strut, and even coming out of the air intake at the front of the plane.  It took us a whole roll of shop towels to clean the mess up, and thankfully the plane that landed behind us a couple minutes later was piloted by an American headed back North in a Cherokee Six, and he let us bum some of his plexiglass cleaner.  Despite all the mess, we were actually only down to 8 quarts.  I had halfway expected to pull the dipstick out of the engine and find it clean.

After determining that there wasn’t any oil to be found at Loreto, either, we made the somewhat rash decision to take off again and fly the remaining hour or so to San Jose Del Cabo.  I think we were feeling emboldened by the fact that we weren’t dead yet.  The plane behaved itself on the last leg of the trip, and we made it safely back to the ground at our final destination.  More oil had seeped out onto the plane during the flight, and it was a bit of a sight to see a tiny little 182, streaks of oil running along the fuselage, parked between two private jets.  We were THOSE guys, I thought, as I wiped up more oil with a dirty shop towel.  But we were alive, in Cabo, and the situation could only get better.  Surely there was not only oil, but also good surf and cold beer awaiting us over the next couple days.  Two out of three ain’t bad.

Flying the final approach to San Jose Del Cabo International Airport: