Oh, the smell. It’s the first thing that brands on your mind. If you’re not around it, or haven’t shot for sometime, the first time you open up those bottles, it’s like coming home. And to be in my makeshift darkroom, just a wooden box with a blackout curtain tossed over it, with the smells and the thick air, and to see that first image appear after I poured the developer – I will never forget it. It’s crazy to me how making an image can be so moving to one’s soul. Hell, it’s just a photo, right? ……but it just grabs you, and when it has a hold on you, you will never be free from it even if you wanted to. Just like farming or working the land has that hold on me too, never can I be far from the smell of new cut hay or the soil just plowed over, or the smell of fir boughs and pitch as I thin the weak and dying trees from the forest. Smells are the most evocative sense to me, and now I can add the smell of ether and collodion. The sweet smell of the silver bath. The smells in my life: they will be what I remember most, I’m sure, until the day I die.