The actual map we used on the Hispar . carry more anyway . I could only dream of being a National Geographic photographer , with apparently limitless �ilm to play with and , presumably , a dedicated porter to carry it . I ' d have done better to console myself with thoughts of pioneers like the Abraham Brothers or Vittorio Sella and their cumbersome plate cameras ; to them thirty shots in one day was surely undreamed-of pro�ligacy .
Still , I ' d known all along that twenty-�ive rolls was my lot . Of course it was sometimes dif�icult to walk past a good shot , hoping but not knowing that there might be a better one round the next corner , but that was how it had to be .
Losing my zoom lens was different , because I hadn ' t anticipated it . It was long after before I began to see that there might have been a silver lining . The message really sank in subsequent trips , when I lumbered myself with three times as much gear , but didn ’ t get three times better pictures . Maybe , I began to think , less is more .
One plus was that , with such a small small selection of gear , it could all be instantly accessible , allowing me to react fast , whether to changing light or to other opportunities , like a line of porters forming a particular pattern .
I had just three lens options : 24 , 50 , or 100mm . As such , I usually knew straight away which lens to use — and as time went on I found I was ‘ seeing ’ more and more shots before looking through the view�inder . I was at least beginning to ' visualise ', a skill of which Ansel Adams wrote eloquently . Maybe I had something of an ' eye ' before , but the hard lessons of the Karakoram certainly helped develop it .
Hindsight is a wonderful thing ; with long-range hindsight I can now see that my ‘ disaster ’ wasn ’ t really disastrous at all . Ultimately , it did me more good than harm . The lessons about the subtler bene�its of travelling light might have taken a while to sink in , but they ' ve stayed with me .
I might have been ' travelling light ' in terms of camera gear , but not overall . A tight budget meant that we had porter support for the walk-in to Snow Lake , but not for the onward journey over the
outdoor focus / summer 2021 7