Opening: Friday Night Liberty

I was invited by California State Parks' Southern Service Center to provide the images for their share of a much larger open house and artwalk at Liberty Station in San Diego. It's on Friday, May 1st. After the artwalk, the photos will remain to decorate the State Parks offices (and remain on sale) for quite a while.

State Parks selected images that were related to California State Parks and specifically selected two that showed human-made assets in the parks.

I had the images printed on jumbo-sized Fuji metallic paper and professionally framed at Miller's Professional Imaging; they are going to look fantastic! We'll know for certain when they arrive in two days.

It was an honor to be invited, and I think State Parks and the Friday Night Liberty patrons will find the photos pleasing. (Actually, it's the State Parks personnel who have to work with the prints on their walls for quite a while after the show...)

I'll provide more information about the time and location of the event closer to the date.

Coyotes!

Out hiking today with my wife, we spotted a family of wild coyotes. It's such a delight seeing wild animals being wild in wild places. 

A Ten Minute Trip to a Whole Different World

If you're ever feeling too hot in the desert, try taking a ride up the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. The tramway's mountain station is 8,500 feet high on the edge of nearly 11,000 foot high Mount San Jacinto, in California's Mount San Jacinto State Park. 

The floors of the Swiss-made tramcars revolve 360 degrees twice during the extremely steep ascent up the mountain. They are the worlds largest revolving tram cars... and the only ones in the Nothern hemisphere. The only other ones are at Table Mountain in South Africa.

Inside the tram everyone is rapt as the view grows increasingly spectacular... and the drop increasingly far. Everyone, that is, except the operator. The cars hold up to 80 people and are also the only means of getting water and supplies up to the park at the top.

Halfway up the mountain, the tram passes the descending car. Since the cars counterbalance each other, they pass at the midpoint.

Getting closer the the Mountain Station and disembarking into a world completely different from the Sonora desert we just left.

Closer still. If you are unlucky enough to be bothered by heights, it's best not to look back, because the drop is huge. (I'm so glad I don't suffer from this).

As you ascend (and descend), the car revolves. If you were in a spot you didn't favor at the beginning of the trip, don't worry... you'll see everything at some point. Here were are reaching the mountain station to disembark.

Once arrived, you are in the mountains 8,500 feet (2,600 meters) above the desert floor in the Alpine forest of Mount San Jacinto State Park. There are miles of hiking and skiing trails, and two vast connected wilderness areas, if you like to get away from everything and everyone. In fact, the Pacific Crest Trail passes through here. That trail stretches from Mexico to Canada. Up here, it's usually about 30 degrees cooler than in the desert below, and of course the terrain, flora, and fauna are completely different. It's like a ten minute ride to a whole new world.

Stormy Sunset

To me, blue skies are boring. I watch the weather reports and when it's going to be interesting out there, that's when I leave home with the cameras.

Stormy sunset on Mount Rubidoux, Riverside, California

Being There Now: The 60 Freeway Mastodon

Is there something in your life that you rush past every day wondering what's it's like up close? You never have time to stop and check it out, but you see it as you go by and wonder about it. For some it could be a store or a park or piece of street art or a building facade. For some Angelinos, for example, it could be the Hollywood sign. They see it from afar but and they have an idea what it might be like up there, but have never taken the time to go see it up close. They just wonder about it.

In my adopted home town, our Hollywood sign is an enormous rusty mastodon sculpture by the side of the 60 freeway. I pass it almost every day as I'm rushing off somewhere, have for years, always wondering what it's like up close. One day I decided to search for images on the internet. I thought it would be a good shortcut. But alas, it seems as if everybody just stands at the bottom of the hill with their cameras and tries to zoom in. That's not at all like being there.

Here's what it looks like in Google street view. It's a prominent landmark, but relatively far away, and for someone like me who loves monumental things, prehistoric megafauna, outsider art, metal, public oddities and roadside attractions, I finally had to grab my camera and go see this thing up close. And not standing by the side of the freeway and zooming in. I had to go be there.

I was not disappointed! 

The sculpture is part of the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center, a sort of combination amateur natural history museum and outsider art exhibit. They have this mastodon, plus a dozen or more monumental dinosaurs made out of various materials. They also have an excellent cactus and succulent garden, a gift shop and mineral exhibit, and some other seemingly random things.

I learned again a lesson I have learned many times before: don't just wonder about things. Go and find out for yourself.

Shoot 'n' Scoot or Stay and Play?

When I was just beginning to learn photography, I did a lot of what I call "shoot 'n' scoot." I'd go to a photographically interesting place, take a bunch of pictures in rapid succession, and then move on to the next pretty thing.

It took a while to learn to linger, to take in a scene, and see what happens. The good pictures from a shoot 'n' scoot are lucky shots; if you stay and get the rhythm of the place you're in, you'll have better success and learn much more.

If you're a beginner trying to improve your shots, try being slow and deliberate. Work with different settings, different angles, wait for interesting events and really "grok" a scene the best you can before moving on.

Shoot 'n' Scoot is fine for when you're a tourist or visiting places with your family. But when you're out in the field trying to make the best images you can, stay and play! One nice shot is much better than 100 ok pictures.

The Desert Winter

Every New Year's Day, Stephanie and I take a long day trip to the Mojave. It's our way to start the year with some calm beauty, because few places are as serene and lovely as the Mojave Desert in winter.

This year, New Year's eve was scheduled to receive bad weather--snow flurries and icy rain-- so we moved our annual trip forward a day. I always make a point to get out to the desert when the weather is going to be doing something interesting, because the more interesting the weather, the more interesting the landscape photography. In fact, if the sky is blue and the sun is high, my camera probably stays in the bag.

A fact about the Mojave that many people don't realize: its elevation varies wildly, from a low of 282 feet below sea level at Badwater to a high of 11,000 feet in the Panamint Mountains. Much of the Mojave is mountainous, and when it snows the elevation differences really stand out. One moment you can be driving in a snow storm, and a moment later you can be driving through a sand storm.

Moving our trip back a day to catch the weather was fortunate; the day was absolutely gorgeous and moody, the light at turns submarine and ecstatic. At its worst, in the wrong light, the desert can look stark and hideous, like a wound. But in the right light, it can be desperately lovely, full of promise and begging to be explored.

Happy New Year!

We hope you and yours have a great 2015!

Get Closer

The celebrated war photographer Robert Capa once famously quipped, "if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." It's an interesting and provocative thought, especially coming from a war photographer, for whom getting closer means getting closer to getting killed.

But Capa was right, of course. Many pictures would be improved by having a closer, larger subject or simply being cropped. This is because, like all art, photography usually benefits from simplification, from that clarity of communication that can only come when extraneous elements are excluded from the piece, and idea you are signifying with the picture is not subsumed in a flurry of unrelated shapes and colors, leaving the purpose of the communication fuzzy, its impact needlessly anemic.

So I try to leave out anything that isn't helping move us forward. This applied when I was writing poetry, where I laboriously pored over every single syllable, deciding if it was pulling its weight of if it had to go. And it's true of photography, but with photography, this simplification is difficult in a different way. Rather than making something from scratch, we're interpreting and communicating something that already exists. The tools for interpreting a scene photographically are pretty simple: we have focal point, framing, light and shadow, shutter speed effects, depth of field, focal length/angle of view, and distance. But putting those together into a provocative bit of information can be very tricky, and truly eliminating extraneous elements is sometimes impossible. When mindful of simplicity, framing and distance are the most powerful tools--the ones we usually turn to first.

As I approached the cluttered field of the air museum at March Air Force base this morning and saw how haphazard and scattered everything looked, with no clean backgrounds and no way to take a powerful photo of an entire plane, I remembered what Robert Capa said. Get closer. 

The Mission Inn

Every year at Christmastime, our local Landmark, The Mission Inn, decorates with a superabundance of colored lights. It's lovely and it brings people in from miles around to enjoy. You have to go at dawn, however, if you want to get photographs without throngs of people in them.