Well I finally bit the bullet and bought a film scanner.  Well it’s not really a film scanner, it’s a scanner that can scan film (or so the geeks will tell you).  But it works and it scans slides, negatives (B+W or color) and most importantly 120 and 35mm film.  What’s 120?  Well it’s medium format film.  I have a Bronica MF camera I shot a lot when I lived in Montana.  It’s actually impressive to see the quality of the scans I’m getting as I haven’t touched film since I went digital ~5 years ago…  There is a difference for sure, and I’m actually considering shooting film now alongside digital…

Anyway, enough about the boring technical mumbo jumbo, on with the trip!!!  When I was in MT I was getting a photography degree.  I knew my senior year meant 2 HUGE senior projects for my photo classes.  But huge just meant a lot of shots and prints to show/share so I figured I’d take a killer road trip, photograph it, and use that as my matterial.  I sat down with an atlas (I would have KILLED to have google maps back then) and drew a route up across the country.  I had one major problem, that beeing all my spending money came from summer jobs, so I couldn’t just take weeks off for something like this.  So I planned one week, and pushed the route as far as I figured it would go.  Nikki was in for the trip as well and here’s what the route ended up being:

We went from RI to Chicago, then Denver, then Zion, then the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, San Fran, Redwood, Mt Rainier and then back to Bozeman.  It ended up being 5,500 miles in 9 days and one hell of a trip.  Sure we would have loved to have more time, but we loved every second we had and still love going on similar trips now (see last summer’s Canada trip).  Anyway, enough of these booring words, here’s the photos (I got an ‘A’ BTW):

645 images (medium format film camera):

35mm images:

and here’s what made it into the final project: