After many years of living in perpetually sunny climates, I enjoy occasionally seeing some cloud cover and a hint of winter. I loved the starkness of these trees and the ominous sky in the background.
Bare Trees - Utah Lake
I love the ethereal, other-worldliness of this image. It’s a photograph of a couple of fairly ordinary rocks, but the long exposure turns the rocks into mysterious islands shrouded in mist.
Rocks - Laguna Beach
Another early morning expedition down to the pier at Newport Beach. Saturday mornings are much busier than weekdays, but I arrived early enough to set up my camera and capture several images before the throngs of tourists and fishermen arrived.
Here is the pier, just before sunrise.
Newport Pier - Dawn
I was up and out early this morning to photograph the goings-on in and around the Newport Pier in Newport Beach, California. It was an overcast morning, so the line between sea and sky was diffuse, almost unrecognizable, which can make for interesting images. One of my favorite photographers, Hiroshi Sugimoto, has made a series of sensational seascapes using the blending of water and sky to great effect. This was a Sugimoto kind of day.
I arrived early enough to capture several long exposures before the sun came up and then stuck around to photograph the dawn surf patrol.
Newport Pier - Newport Beach, CA
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Newport Pier - Newport Beach, CA
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Solitary Surfer - Newport Beach, CA
For years I have been driving through the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm on the way to Palm Springs or Phoenix and have wanted to pull off the freeway to take a look around. I suppose I always assumed that I wouldn’t be able to get close enough to the windmills to make the detour worthwhile. Turns out I was wrong. I finally decided to stop a few weeks ago on a monsoon-y afternoon drive from Phoenix to Orange County and was able to get much closer to these massive structures than I had expected. There is something very ominous about this setting, like a scene from a David Lynch or Coen brothers movie….
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I was on the road and in the air for much of August, including a long drive from Phoenix to Midway, Utah at the beginning of the month. I have made that trip several times and never tire of the spectacular scenery found along the entire route. My greatest frustration in driving those roads is not being able to stop every time I see something I’d like to shoot. It’s a drive that can normally be completed in 10 or 11 hours, but with several detours along the way, it took us the better part of two days. If I had stopped every time I wanted to, I’m sure I could have spent a week or more meandering my way north.
One of the detours we made was through the Valley of the Gods, located just north of Mexican Hat, Utah. We had spent part of the previous day driving the heavily traveled loop through Monument Valley, which is beautiful, but a little overrun by tourists. By contrast, the Valley of the Gods, which I think is equally as dramatic as Monument Valley, was empty. I think we may have seen one or two other cars during our several hour drive through the valley. I was experimenting with a GoPro HD camera, which I attached to my headlight with a suction cup, so I didn’t take many still images of Valley of the Gods, but I will post some video once I have a chance to edit it.
Here are a few of the images from the road trip:
Moonrise in Monument Valley
Cairns mirroring geological formations in Monument Valley.
A fisherman on Deer Creek Reservoir, Utah
A wakeboarder on Deer Creek Reservoir, Utah
A skeleton (deer?) by the side of the road.
Derelict gas station – Arizona SR 163
A detail from the derelict gas station on Arizona SR 163
It is said the Bonneville Salt Flats are so huge and so flat that from certain perspectives one can see the curvature of the Earth. It is also one of the few places on the Earth wide enough and flat enough for motorized land speed records to be set. Several times each year, hundreds of highly modified cars and motorcycles converge on the flats to see who can push the speed envelope just a tiny bit further. Some of the vehicles don’t look much different than what you might see driving on a neighborhood road and others bear more resemblance to aircraft than they do to automobiles.
Bonneville Speed Week, one of the largest annual events on the salt flats, was held last week and I was able to get out on the salt for a day to capture some of the action. I had a great time, met some fantastic people and saw a bunch of cars and motorcycles go really, really fast. Here are a couple of the images:
Bonneville Salt Flats
An unblown fuel streamliner getting ready to go fast.
Monochrome – Bonneville Speed Week
Some folks come to go fast and some come to ogle.
This is the short course. The long course is seven or more miles long.
Spectators. Mountains. Salt.
