Evening Lights in Bombay Beach

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.

Evening Lights in Bombay Beach

The Side of Bushnell Tower with Fewer Windows

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.

The Side of Bushnell Tower with Fewer Windows

Bombay (More) Beach

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.

Bombay (More) Beach

Salton Sea Ω

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.

Salton Sea Ω

Arrayed Before Northam

A mixture of wide-angle lens distortion and “impossible” aerial drone viewpoint make for brain-twisting images of already strange and transient phenomena, like the chairs and stage of Trinity College’s Commencement Ceremony arrayed on the quad.

Arrayed Before Northam