I celebrated the arrival of the spring equinox by carefully packing up some of my best camera gear and going on a photo shoot. Ok, actually, I shoved my cell phone into my pocket and walked across the street for a sunset shot.
The 2025 photography season has to start somewhere, right? Right? If you’re talking planning, the photography season has never stopped. When I’m not shooting I’m thinking about it – that never changes. In terms of actual production … yeah.
Prepping for a season of photography from a travel trailer is a new experience with a learning curve because I need to know all about my trailer and the vehicle that gets it where it needs to be. So far this year I have learned about axle weight, pin weight, payload weight, pulling weight, dry weight, curb weight (Gilgamesh is 7,440 lbs), tire rated weight, and gross vehicle rated weight. I have learned about quality diesel fuel, how it still needs diesel additive to protect your engine (especially its $500 apiece injectors), and the importance of non-expired diesel exhaust fluid (DEF). I have even learned about diesel regeneration and monitoring turbo boost and exhaust temperatures while towing and for engine maintenance.
Late model diesel trucks have Byzantime emissions systems, which complicates maintaining them. A gasoline vehicle basically has one major cleaning stage where it poots out exhaust gases through its catalytic converter, which removes the bulk of the nasties. Not my diesel, it has several. One where the exhaust passes through a diesel particulate filter (DPF), one where DEF is added to the exhaust to cancel out nasties, and finally the catalytic converter which makes up a quarter tonne of my 1 tonne’s 3.375 tonnes of weight (yes, that is confusing for me as well).
Most of the problems new diesel owners have come from their not being aware of how their trucks work. The DPF fills with soot and crap from the engine and eventually goes through a regeneration cycle to clean it out. What that means is a gate opens in the exhaust system so that the temperature of the DPF rises to between 1100-1300 degrees Farenheit and it burns that evil shit out, yo. On the cluster above. The amount of particulate in the filter is indicted by the DPF TRIGGER. It turns red at 95% to warn me a regeneration cycle is about to start and at 100% it triggers. The DPF REGEN indicator then flips to 1 (on) and turns red while the regen is happening. The exhaust gas temperature (EGT) on the outlet from the DPF filter will climb to between 1100-1300F. Hotter is better and you want to have the truck under load or on the highway for this. Once done, the EGT TRIGGER will hopefully drop below 5% indicating a good regeneration. The outlet temperature also drops and will roughly match the inlet temperature again.
One of the worst things you can do as a diesel owner is inadvertently shut down your engine partway through a regeneration cycle. The soot winds up baking into the DPF and doesn’t clear out as well in successive cycles. Which is why I spent $10 on a computer port dongle, $5 on a monitoring app, and $12 on a phone mount that puts all this where I can see it on the dashboard of my truck all in the hope of avoiding an $800 repair bill. You’d think something this critical would be highlighted on the instrumentation of your diesel vehicle, but it is not, thus the technical gymnastics related above.
This is the craziest prep I have ever done for a season of photography, I’ll tell you that. The good news is that I’m not thinking about new cameras at all, like I normally would be. Probably because I shot my wad on the truck. Bloody hell. The 2025 pixel harvest has now officially started, and this year it’s powered by diesel. Here’s to clean filters both on my lenses and in my engine.
Oh look, another mobile phone image! The good news is that I pulled the bags of real cameras out of the closet several times and moved them around the basement several more times. Progress.
