HDR Photography
One of my earliest memories is climbing the rope into the hayloft of my grandfather’s sheep barn. As his advancing age prevented him from making the journal out to the barn, it slowly fell into disrepair, but I’m glad I was able to take a final trip to capture what Granddad always referred to as “the homestead”.
This little town on the shores of the Salton Sea is only a few blocks in each direction, a sort of echo of what might have been in a different ecological timeline. My favorite detail of the image, though, are the other lights away on the far shore of the Sea, just beneath the mountains, suggesting another world still out there.
Unlike past summers, when drought left central Kentucky crispy, a rainy summer produced lush foliage around the bridge over the South Elkhorn Creek.
Narrow sticks emerge at regular intervals from the water, silhouetted in the reflected sunset, raising more questions than they can answer along the shoreline of the evaporating Salton Sea.
Bushnell Tower was originally intended to have a twin rising next to it. Though the cost of the first tower ultimately scuttled plants for the second, echoes of the goal remain in the design. It wouldn’t have done to have windows looking directly into one’s neighbors, so the side of the building originally designed to face its partner was constructed with very few windows. My personal stance is to enjoy the little bit of strangeness in a world that threatens to become a bit more smoothed-down and homogenous.
As I noted last week, the gradual evaporation of the Salton Sea has left Bombay Beach with more and more of its namesake. The outlines of the town show where the earthen sea wall was constructed to protect it from flooding that now seems less and less likely; the comparatively more green-hued beach shows the areas that were more recently submerged.
The lights of the Hartford Public Library in the foreground provide a safer, more orderly home for the eye than the highly abnormal weather feature expanding forth around Travelers Tower like some portal to an evil dimension.
The slow disappearance of the Salton Sea has moved dramatic art pieces, like this tetrahedron that once rose mysteriously from the water, onto a broad expanse of beach where some of their magic evaporates with the sea.
When I added the “Ω” to the title of this image, I imagined endings across multiple dimensions of time: Certainly, a sunset is the end of a day, but I was also thinking on the longer scale of how the slow march of evaporation and desert climate are continuously shrinking the Salton Sea. In a more personal sense, this was likely to be my last visit to the Sea—at least in anything like its current state. All of those combined finalities made this one worthy of being the omega.
Hartford was thrown into an apocalyptic atmospheric condition this week, and while wildfire smoke is terrible for our community’s health, it makes for some bonkers pictures. At 1:00 PM, we were thrown into orange shade.
Even sheltering indoors, the seeping yellow light was inescapable through skylights and windows.
Even a huge freight train is just a tiny chain in the stretch of desert.
When it comes to classic car guys, the Chevy (wagon) versus Ford (truck) debate leads to some serious vehicle comparisons in the evening California sun.
I-10 runs across the dry ancient lakebed that is now Coachella Valley and but the absence of easy bridges over the stark divider has produced some odd impacts on the resulting sprawl.
A real Shelby Cobra is a multi-million dollar machine, so it’s no surprise that it’s one of the most kit-car-copied vehicles in existence—so much so that my default assumption upon seeing a Cobra-shaped vehicle is to assume it’s a replica. In this case, I’m not so sure—could this be the real deal?
While my past approach to photography through aircraft windows was focused on avoiding distracting reflections, the realness of the Artemis II photos—specifically those with astronauts’ hands and faces reflected in spacecraft windows—made me appreciate how the nature of our relationship with Earth though technology can be conveyed. The drama of the American West is more impressive when it’s clear what altitude allowed us to visualize it.
Decaseconds 