HDR Photography
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
Never has so dramatic a sky of natural beauty been accompanied by so bland a human foreground of golf courses and subdivisions, but that’s the paradox of California for you.
Monday’s post brought me back to the epic imagery of the Bay Area that I suspect I took a bit for granted back when we were starting Decaseconds in 2011. Convincing oneself that one is a photographer is easy when these are the views—but I’m glad I had the potency of these places to get me through those awkward early years of developing as a photographer.*
*Apologies for the wordplay.
A weird spate of “Bay Area weather”—cloudy and rainy in the morning, bright and sunny in the afternoon, chilly but not cold—has brought moments like these, picnicking on the grounds of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, back to my mind.
Dawn light illuminates the old Indio, California—a farming city of date plantations and strange water projects. In the distance, the oncoming scourge of sprawling subdivisions may signal the end of this particular era.
The bright rooftops in the foreground are L&G Desert Store, a local grocery established in 1979, an ongoing representation of what Indio was during an earlier era, before it was encrusted with subdivisions.
Winter rain in Coachella Valley brings deep, somber hues to the monoculture arrays of date palms. I usually aim for depth and variety in my images, with a sense of definite space, so it’s an engaging game to depart from that and focus on a single plane and hypnotic pattern.
Decaseconds 