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In the summer of 1981, just before we went to England, we did a trip up to the Kootenays, and then went down to Idaho to buy a guitar, and then back via Grand Coulee, Spokane, Wenatchee and then up the I-5 to the border.

This is the G-Man and his mum, reading up about the dam, prior to looking at it, presumably so you understand what you're seeing.

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For this one I used pretty extreme contrast, in an attempt to try and get a sense of the heat of the sun beating down. It was very hot this day.

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LOC labels this as a general view of the fortress from the Likanskii palace. But another shot (I've placed it next in line in the photostream), taken from a slightly different angle, is labelled, "Dabskii Monastery. Built by the father of Tsarina Tamara in 1175." So, you be the judge: castle or monastery? The upper building appears to have crenellations, but that could either be because, in 1175, the monastery needed to be defensible, or simply due to the action of time, as parts of the wall fall away, while others remain standing. Personally, I think it's a monastery. As a fortress, it looks far too small to be practicable, and if its height makes it difficult to assault, it also makes it difficult to enter and leave, thus, not much use to its garrison (which would have to be quite small).

What these two shots, this one and the next, really show, I think, is that for some of these shots, SPG compiled them long after he shot them, and had to rely on his memory to tell him what he was looking at when his notes were defective. One shot, for example, is labelled Boy from Capri, but it's quite obvious when you look at it, that it was taken in Northern Europe, and nowhere near the island of Capri. Attempts to identify all the places and people in SPG's shots are ongoing, but alas, the best ones are on a Russian website, so you have to translate their notes as best you can.

The Likanskii palace I assume to be in the reverse of this shot. It was built in the town of Borjomi, in Georgia, by Nicholas, Grand Duke in the 1890s; Nicholas was a political liberal, much like that other Grand Duke (a different Romanov branch), Michael Alexander, who introduced SPG to the Tsar, which got him his subvention to document the Empire. This photograph dates I think from an earlier time, and rather goes along with the "vacation" type photos SPG shot in Gagra and other places in Georgia. In Borjomi too, says Wikipedia, is "Catherine's Spring," a source of curative waters which SPG also photographed (see the picture in this set, Tsagvery Spring).

The tree colours vary quite a bit, and for two reasons. First, because of plate damage. I elected not to clean up the plates extensively because such blemishes effectively disappear into the stochastic pattern of the forest. Second, because the trees themselves are both deciduous and coniferous, meaning they naturally have different shades of green. I think, for SPG, the attraction of the shot comes partly from its resemblance to nineteenth century prints of romantic, isolated locations, where time has softened the brutalities and exclusions and left only these ruins. Indeed, our own attraction to SPG's photos partakes of a similar nostalgia, as we see only the surface of things, and rarely the difficulties faced by those who lived in the then and there.

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Same day, more or less the same time, rotating the camera around by about forty degrees to the west. Again, nice shot, but very very grainy because I didn't set the meter properly to balance the exposure. Ah well....

Shots taken with the Zenit-E can be scanned at about 3200dpi and will preserve pretty much all the detail on the original negative.

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