Every year my extended family (on my mother's side) meets at a campground up north for a reunion. It's a perfect opportunity to make some portraits of family members, especially since many of them are now in or around their 80s.

For portraits, I packed the SL2 with wide and long lenses and also the Hasseblad with six rolls of film. For candids, I packed the Leica MP and a handful of HP5. I even threw the Westcott strobe in the trunk. I was loaded for bear.

I took a dozen photos with the SL2 and an M lens before tiring of manual focus. I put the 85mm on it and took a dozen more, all candid and all from wherever I happened to be sitting.

And that was it. I just didn't feel like being the guy with the giant camera getting up in everyone's space all the time. I didn't like lugging the big camera and I didn't like how it made me feel while using it. I felt intrusive and unnecessary. I didn't make a single film image.

The whole event was a huge disappointment, photographically speaking. It's not that there wasn't anything to photograph. It was that I simply didn't feel like doing the work.

I've been wondering if the problem was partly that I was uncomfortable using the SL2 with the big lens. It felt like I was role-playing a photojournalist. And if you're going to do that, you should go all in and not shoot tentatively from a chair using a long lens.

Anyway, it was a disheartening afternoon and I'll need to think about why.