Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away

Every once in a while I go to my film archives and pore over the work I  was doing in those days. Sometimes I find an image that, for whatever reason, I haven’t scanned to digital; at other times I come across something that I scanned years ago, but was done at too low a resolution, with poor color management, or both. The photographs included here are from my last journey through the past and are all re-processed.

These aspen leaves were on the forest floor in the high country of the Jemez Mountains where I live. Sometimes, depending on moisture and temperature conditions, the aspens will turn a firey red with yellow hi-lighting the veins. I remember coming across these leaves and spending a long time moving around trying different compositions. This was one of the best of that series.

Nikon F3, Nikkor 105mm f2.8 macro, 1/5 sec, f16, Fuji Velvia 50

I went through a period when every photograph I made was a close-up, or a macro. This image caught my eye and I thought of it as a family portrait because all the elements were from a pine tree: the textured, multi-toned bark, the cone, and the needles haphazardly strewn across it all made a beautiful, serendipitous composition.

Nikon F100, Nikkor 105mm f2.8 macro, 1/10 sec, f11, Fuji Velvia 50

This waterfall has long been a favorite location of mine. The river tumbles through a drop in a narrow canyon with granite walls. The visual and thematic contrast make a powerful statement about the raw power of nature.

Nikon F3, Nikkor 80-200mm f2.8 @200mm, 1.3 sec, f11, Kodachrome 64

The Valle Grande is the caldera of a collapsed volcano that is the center of the Jemez Mountains. In the winter with several feet of snow on the ground and a north wind, the blown snow can form a cornice like this one. I found these pine saplings poking through the crest during a January storm.

Nikon F 100, Nikkor 35-70mm f2.8 @55mm, 1/20 sec, f16, Kodachrome 64

If you are interested in purchasing a print of one of the images in this post, just click on the image and you will be directed to that image’s page on my website.

Quiet Places

There are undoubtedly many beautiful places in this world that are photogenic without really trying to be. We have all seen them hundreds of times: Tunnel View in Yosemite, Delicate Arch in Arches, The Mittens in Monument Valley…But there are also those places that don’t jump up and pound their chests demanding your attention. The quiet places that are just as beautiful and meaningful in their own unassuming way as the shiny crowd pleasers.

In Joshua Tree National Park there is a grove of these members of the yucca family. It is tucked away in an alcove just off a dirt road in the northwest section of the park. There I found this specimen growing against a wall of sandstone.

Nikon D810, Nikkor 24-120mm f4 @ 120mm, 1/5 sec, f16

When snow falls in the mountains where I live, I am compelled by the mystery of the shrouded landscape to go into it and make photographs. In this image it was the drooping, snow-laden branches and needles that attracted my attention.

Nikon Df, Nikkor 80-200mm f2.8 @ 200mm, 1/500 sec, f8

This series of cascades on the Guadalupe River is choked by granite boulders that made for a precarious scramble on this winter day. The ice covered granite was slick and placing the tripod was tricky, but the results were well worth it. This spot is a favorite of mine and I have returned to it many times; this image is one of the best out of many that I have made in this location.

Nikon F3, Nikkor 35-70 mm f2.8 @35mm, 1 sec, f18, Fuji Velvia

The slot canyons of the Colorado Plateau are remarkable for their other-worldly beauty. This image is from Little Wildhorse Canyon in the San Rafael Swell, but it could have been made in any of the countless other slots that make up the labyrinthine drainage system of central Utah.

Nikon D810, Nikkor 24-120mm f4 @ 35mm, 1 sec, f11

If you are interested in purchasing a print of one of the images in this post, just click on the image and you will be directed to that image’s page on my website.

The Other Badlands

The Bisti Wilderness is by far the most well known of the badlands in the San Juan Basin. It was the most popular when I was leading photography tours out there. But, there are numerous other places that qualify as badlands.This petrified tree trunk is located in the Fossil Forest, a small area south of the Bisti Wilderness. It sits on the edge of a ridge which is the only elevated ground for miles in any direction.

Nikon D700, Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @ 24mm, 1/25 sec, f16While exploring a remote area along Ah Shi Sle Pah Wash several miles west of what is considered to be the Ah Shi Sle Pah badlands, I came across this curious formation in a small alcove near the edge of what I would describe as a sculpture garden of hoodoos.

Nikon D810, Nikkor 16-35mm f4 28mm, 1/40 sec, f18

Along the southern margin of Ah Shi Sle Pah Wash there is a zone which I think of as the yellow badlands. It is a particularly rugged area with steep drainages and many places that would easily collapse under a hiker’s weight into a subterranean maze of eroded caverns and channels.

Nikon D800, Nikkor 24-120 mm f4 @24mm, 1/5 sec, f18

This is another bizarre formation I came across quite by accident while wandering along the far western end of Ah Shi Sle Pah Wash. Since then it has become a destination. I’m happy to have known it before the masses arrived.

Nikon D800, Nikkor 16-35mm f4 @32 mm, 1/15 sec, f16

If you are interested in purchasing a print of one of the images in this post, just click on the image and you will be directed to that image’s page on my website.

Adobe

Just about anywhere you go in New Mexico, you will find crumbling adobe ruins. They speak of a time when the pace of life was more relaxed, more sane. I have photographed hundreds of these ruins over the years. These are just a few of my favorites.

I have photographed this adobe wall several times. It is tucked away in a small northern New Mexico village. I love the layers on this wall, the peeling paint, the crumbling stucco, the eroded adobe, and then there’s the weathered wooden slats and peeling plywood.

Nikon DF, Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @42mm, 1/500 sec, f8

This rock/adobe house is tucked away in a village not far from where I live. I’ve driven past it thousands of times, but I never noticed it (hidden back off the road as it is). When I did finally see it it had a visual impact on me and I made this image.

Nikon DF, Nikkor 80-200 f2.8 @150mm, 1/80 sec, f10

In eastern New Mexico there are many small communities that are just hanging on. They boomed during the 50s and 60s when many people were driving the Mother Road, US 66. Today they are but ghosts of their former selves. I found this old pink adobe in one of those villages.

Nikon DfF, Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @35mm, 1/640 sec., f10

I was attracted to the colors and textures in this scene. The house is located on a two lane highway in north-central New Mexico, but the small town was pretty much deserted

Nikon DF, Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 @50mm, 1/160 sec, f5

If you are interested in purchasing a print of one of the images in this post, just click on the image and you will be directed to that image’s page on my website.

 

 

Rhododendrons in the Redwoods

The splendid rhodora now sets the swamps on fire with its masses of rich color. It is one of the first flowers to catch the eye at a distance in masses,–so naked, unconcealed by its own leaves.

Henry David Thoreau
Journal-May 17, 1854

 

I was lucky to be driving through the coatsal redwoods in northern California a couple years ago just at the time the rhododendrons were in bloom. Me being a desert rat from New Mexico, it felt like I was in a fairyland.

The soft, fragile leaves and flowers of the rhododendrons set against the backdrop of the towering, solid trunks of the redwoods was a powerful visual element. The light mist in the deeper parts of the forest added to the sense of mystery in the scene.

 

If you are interested in purchasing a print of one of the images in this post, just click on the image and you will be directed to that image’s page on my website.

Herons!

I admire herons, they are solitary hunters, they mostly keep to themselves, and they are are quick to depart when something, or someone encroaches on their space.

I was photographing in the Bolsa Chica Wildlife Refuge near Huntington Beach, California when I saw this great blue perched atop a snag at a considerable distance from me. I grabbed my 600 mm lens and made several photographs. I like the way his guard feathers are moving as he turned his head

This small pond at Bosque del Apache is usually crowded with cormorants, but on this day there was just this great blue heron hunting for a meal. It was a calm day, so there were hardly any ripples on the pond, which meant near perfect reflections. I stayed for a long time making photographs and this one was the best.

This heron was perched along the edge of a dranage canal at Bosque del Apache in late December. It was a cold day and he was huddled against the frigid wind.

I mentioned earlier that herons are usually pretty skittish and fly off if you try to approach them, but I’ve rarely had that happen at Bosque del Apache. It’s as if they know they are in a safe environment.

These last two images are part of a series made over more than an hour while I watched this great blue heron hunting for his lunch. I made more than fifty photographs during that time, but these two tell the story pretty well I think.

Nostalgic Tableau

In my travels around New Mexico in search of photographs to document the disappearing culture that once thrived here, I have come across many pleasant surprises. This is one of them.

I was down along the Rio Grande in central New Mexico and found myself in a small village that has a fair share of adobe ruins. Exploring inside one of them, I found this old shirt hanging on a carved door. The window panes have been replaced by wood panels, but the scene caught my imagination and I was suddenly transported forty or fifty years into the past in the presence of the long gone inhabitants.

Windmills

I made this photograph a couple years ago while camping in cental New Mexico. I made several wider angle versions, but I like this tighter one.

The juxtaposition of the old ranch windmill and the windfarm on the mesa caught my eye as I was driving through an old abandoned settlement. I much prefer the more organic look of the old wooden one.

Abstract Reality

The images included here are abstractions in that their relationship to their environment is limited by the frame of the photograph. In other words while they can be recognized for what they are, they cannot readily be associated with their surroundings.

The interactions between the thicker prmary branches and the thinner, more fragile branches, along with the changes in color and tone are the elements that catch the eye, and hold this photograph together.

The patterns and shapes which are given form by the colors in this image are tied together by the lines formed by the branches. What may, at first, look like a jumble of twigs becomes, with a practiced eye, a cohesive image.

This image splits the difference between an abstraction and a more conventional intimate landscape. The soft colors and patterns of the willows in the lower half of the photograph give way to the more solid and, readily recognizable, branches of the cottonwood tree. The snow on the branches of the tree lend just the right amount of softening which ties it all together.

Random Spontaneity

…strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty or a hundred years ago, always seems to look so much better than the new stuff…Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study.

Robert Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Random spontaneity; you can’t get much more un-deliberate than that. Robert Pirsig hit the nail right on the head with that one. Time and the elements have a way of blurring the lines, by the weathering of old wood, by the erosion of brick and adobe, and by the desaturation of colors that seem to make these old, ruined structures a cohesive part of the landscape.

I’ve driven for hours over backroads and two lane blacktops that (refreshingly) haven’t been repaved for decades. One of those roads brought me to Claunch. The village still has a functioning post office, but not much else. This old adobe with just the right amount of color added sits alone waiting for passersby to whom it can tell its story.

The front of this small bungalow near the village of Cerrillos is a hodge-podge of materials; stucco, fake brick, and, underlying it all, plywood. The door is beautifully weathered and the textures are all the more evident due to that weathering.

The thing I like best about this photograph is the cutaway caused by erosion of the adobe wall. It’s like a glimpse into the lives of the long gone inhabitants. The double doors were obviously a replacement of a larger one. The melting adobe gives it all an organic feeling.  To me, these elements speak of lives lived here in times past.

This old wooden shed has been surrounded by Chinese Elm trees. They have grown around its perimeter in an opening gambit to reclaim the ground on which it sits. The scene has a sense of serene finality about it.

Fleeting Moments

There are occurences in nature that are as beautiful as they are short-lived. These small ephemeral miracles are everywhere around us if we take the time to look for them.

Apache Plume puts forth its feathery tendrils after the flower petals drop. These are the seeds which are dispersed by the wind, but when you find them just beginning to grow from their stalks, they appear to be suspended in some hidden undersea world.

Barley Grass seeds have a beautifully complicated, interwoven, geometric structure which to me is more interesting than anything built by man. A couple days after I made this photograph, the seeds were mere husks.

This Cliffrose blossom had some rain drops trapped in its petals and the backlit effect was a diaphonous glow which caused the droplets to show through the petals and accentuate their fragile elegance.

After the Fire

Living in a place that is surrounded by National Forest means that I have the beauty and wonders of the wild, natural world literally at my doorstep. It also means that the danger of wildfire is just as close.

These false lupine are growing in a remote area of the Las Conchas burn scar. This image was made three years after the fire. The quaking aspens, usually the first to repopulate after a fire, are also growing amonst the boles of the standing dead conifers.

This photograph is a close-up detail of ponderosa pine bark that was burned in the Lake Fire in 2002. It is a scan of a 35mm color transparency that I made a couple months after the fire. I was intrigued by the molten metal appearance of the bark.

These trees were consumed by the 2017 Cajete Fire. The wet snow clinging to them gives them a high contrast, graphic look. The trunks and every branch stand out sharply as if they are etched by the frigid air

These burned conifers on a small hill near the Valle Grande are coated with hoarfrost. The result is a fairyland appearance like something out of a snow globe.

These aspen saplings in their autumn color are growing on a hillside burned during the Las Conchas Fire in 2011. The stark contrast between the burned, dead pine, spruce, and fir trees, and the glow created by the backlighting is what captured my attention. Shortly after I made this exposure the effect was gone as the sun moved higher in the sky.

Winterlude

…but alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sproutlands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by church-going and prayer.

                                                                    Henry David Thoreau

This small pine sapling stands in solitary splendor in front of its big brethren. which disappear into the snowy background. There is a sense of calm that comes over me when I am in the woods when the snow is falling.

The branches of these trees; gambel oaks in the foreground and willows in the distance are etched with snow which gives them a sharp look even through the softening effect of the falling snow.

I was attracted to this scene by the snow covered boulder in the foreground and the soft curve between it and the smaller stone. The arrangement of the more prominent trees and their relationship to those in the background had me moving back and forth and side to side until I found this composition.

Some photographs begin as a partially finished idea. But some, like this one, jump out fully formed. The monotone coloration and the chaotic simplicity of the scene made it all the more compelling to me.

I love the spareness of a leafed tree in the winter with a few brown, withered leaves still clinging to its branches. This oak sapling framed by two mature ponderosa pines speaks of the unexpected relationships in nature that only become apparent to the discerning eye.

 

The Writing On The Wall

The title of this post may be somewhat deceptive. Most of us think of writing on the wall as actual markings of some kind made by man (or woman) for the purpose of communicating something to others. And, while a couple of the images included here do feature pictographs and petroglyphs, Most do not. Instead, they are images of natures writing.

This pictograph is on a wall about a quarter mile from my home. It is on the side of a state road, but most people who drive by it are unaware of its presence. Like most drawings of this sort, the meaning is unclear, and lost to the ages but someone in the distant past felt the need to scribe these images onto this rock.

This canyon wall and talus slope is located along the Green River near Hardscrabble Bottom in Canyonlands. I was attracted to the contrast between the rock wall and the living tamarisk as well as the no longer living cottonwood tree. I love the desert varnish on the sandstone and the beginning erosion of what will one day probably be an amphitheater.

This cross-bedded sandstone near the Escalante River in southern Utah speaks for itself. Its story spans ages, and now it is revealed as a work of art millions of years in the making.

These petroglyphs are in the backcountry of Monument Valley. They are called the Eye of the Sun Petroglyphs because of their proximity to an arch bearing that name. It is perhaps someone’s tale of the animals he came across that day, or perhaps a boastful recounting of the game he had killed.

These young aspen trees are growing against a sandstone wall which is covered with lichen. The combination creates a tapestry in which the trees reflect the stains on the wall and overlay them with a filigree of branches.

Here is another example of cross-bedded sandstone. I made this photograph while kayaking with my daughter and her husband in the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior. The colors of the stone combined with the intersecting fracture lines, the lichen, and the small, but tenacious, plants caught my eye almost immediately.

A Visual Feast

There’s a feeling in the air, and over the land, like a quiet expectation that slowly builds until the first blossoms appear on the wild fruit trees. The river is high and fast with the runoff, and the trees and shrubs in the bosque are fairly bursting with nascent energy and life. Spring: a time of rebirth and renewal, a visual feast.

A wild apricot tree celebrates the warmer weather by putting forth its blossoms. I made several exposures of this scene, shifting perspective each time. There are branches above and just barely out of the frame which I found distracting. I tried to balance my in camera crop so I kept the branches from intruding while giving the tree enough room in the frame so it didn’t feel cramped.

This is a typical scene in the river bosque. What compelled me to make this photogrph was the colors. The tamarisks with their orangish red balanced nicely with what I knew would be a bluish green in the background and the yellow and green of the bosque floor. Again, the spacing of the trees became a dance of changing perspectives. Even though those on the right appear “heavier”, this composition seemed the most natural.

This photograph is more about the contrast between the elements than anything else. The blossoming tree is fighting the sage and chamisa for purchase and attention. At the same time it is standing out from the looming willows in the background. It has a subtle joie de vivre that I find attractive.

The colors are my favorite thing about this image. But the patterns and textures run a close second. The chamisa, the tamarisk, and finally, the cottonwood and willow trees in the background all work together to create a tension that feels just right to me.