Seriously, the last six days have been so absolutely crazed that about 10 minutes ago, sitting on my hotel bed in Bruges on Saturday morning, I suddenly realized the post I was writing was about what we did on Thursday, not that I had totally missed writing about Wednesday. The week has been like that. Just when you think you remember everything, you realize you have missed an entire day. That’s crazy! With a capital C.

There is a fix for this: write about it now. So… we met in the lobby at 5:00 am. We took taxis to the train station and caught the 5:30 train to Ghent. We arrived at the main Ghent station at 6:10 and took taxis to St. Michael’s Bridge to get photos of Hogwarts in the Golden Hour. If you aren’t a Harry Potter fan, Hogwarts is the school he attends, and it is quite the spooky castle. The oldest areas of Ghent truly look like Harry Potter lives there. See the photo above if you don't believe me.

This was another chance for me to get friendly with my new travel tripod. It gets easier every time. I’m getting a little more used to all the things I need to do to get my BlackRapid strap off, the tripod plate on, the legs extended, the camera attached to the tripod head, the head leveled, focus set, and then shoot. On our first morning, it took me about 15 minutes (everyone else who was used to working with tripods took about three minutes), but on Wednesday morning in Ghent, I did it in about seven minutes…while standing on a bridge, watching for bikes and cars coming in both directions. It seemed like we had designated watchers who would yell loudly as cars and bikes approached so we could get out of the way. One problem with this system is that, in that dark space, the exposure times were usually 30 seconds or more. So you just push the shutter, it starts taking the photo, and you can’t move the camera and tripod until those 30 seconds are up. If a car or a bike is headed your way, 30 seconds feels like 30 minutes.

We took these incredible photos of Ghent for about an hour, then it was back in the vans, back to the train station, back to Bruges, into cabs to the hotel, drop your gear in your room, run downstairs to breakfast, eat, back upstairs to get our computers, back to the meeting room to start processing photos and to have Scott and Mimo give us tips and teach us techniques for processing until around noon, when we would turn in our best photos to Scott. He would put them on the big screen, and we would all see them and offer critiques. I have to say, it is amazing how many great photographers there are in this group. I also have to say that this is NUTS, and no wonder I can’t remember which day came before which other day.

After the critiques, anyone who wanted lunch went to eat, while others, gluttons for punishment, went back out to shoot Bruges some more. The rest of us took naps, which didn’t help our internal clocks adjust to Belgium time one iota. Around 5:00, I would get up and see if anyone else wanted an early dinner (since we had skipped lunch). I usually had some takers, so we would head out to find a nearby restaurant and eat. After dinner, we would meet back in the lobby at 6:30, grab a cab, and go out somewhere else to shoot.

Another crazy thing about Bruges is its one-way streets and bridges. On our evening shoot, we went to a beautiful spot with a restaurant and an old mill, and I got some shots I loved. Then Scott had planned to take us all to a small village to shoot a windmill at sunset, but he and Mimo could only find one taxi, which took the first six people (Scott went with them so he could pay the cab driver) to the village with the windmills. The rest of us waited with Mimo while he ordered Uber after Uber, but none showed up. He ordered cabs, but none came. Finally, after the sun had completely set, we gave up. But we wondered how we would get back to the hotel. Our local guide, Andy (an awesome fellow), said the hotel was about a 15-minute walk away. We were awestruck. How could that be? The cab ride to get to the shoot had taken almost half an hour. But that’s because of those one-way streets. We all walked back to the hotel and went to bed. Because, as you will see in my next post, Thursday was the day from hell.

I am going to try to add captions to the photos in the gallery below, and I apologize for not having captions on my earlier galleries. It was more important to keep up with posting than to add captions to essentially cool pics. Don’t forget: if you click the first shot, you can scroll through using your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE… don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” — Peter Adams