HDR Photography
We’ve reached the end of 2025 and I’ll celebrate with what I think is one of my best shots of the year—and also just chronologically one of the last shots of the year. The tiny camper van and far-off lights add a sense of scale, saying “goodbye” to the distant events of that past time. Happy New Year!
The Bombay Beach Ruins is a sculpture garden on the shallow shores of the Salton Sea, and this particular swing is the site of some of my favorite pictures—but the gradual evaporation of the sea has stranded a symbol of whimsy and magic on the beach as, well, just a regular swing now.
Returning to this viewpoint year after year, I’ve watched as the small cluster of white buildings (trailers?) at the bottom of this canyon keeps growing. Worksite? Settlement? Cult? Who knows, but I feel like there’s a good noir mystery to be written from this starting point.
Bombay Beach‘s beach keeps expanding as the Salton Sea dries back to where it was at the start of the twentieth century, making for an enormous span to match the enormous arc of sky above.
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
Some kind of teleportation accident seems as likely an explanation as any other for how a swing set wound up in the middle of a lake.
The human-made swing set structure is alone against the huge scale of the Salton Sea, mountains, and sunset beyond. (Excepting, of course, that the Salton Sea is itself effectively human-made.)
This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
This car/plane sculpture at Bombay Beach looks either very ready or very unready to head off into the sunset—but I can’t figure out which.
Does any combination more satirically capture the American experience than an SUV and an Airstream trailer traversing the empty wasteland resulting from an ecological disaster?
Drone photography geometry exercise: a tetrahedron in profile collapses into a triangle, then reflection doubles it into a diamond.
AI-generated images have perhaps made us so inured to impossible images as to dilute the shocking impact of the truly surreal. Bombay Beach’s sculptures, planted in the shores of the Salton Sea, “floating” in the sky, truly look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Rain brings spontaneous desert symmetry breaking: some areas become rivers and streams, while others stay high and dry. La Quinta Cove brings hiking trails into this equation. Looking high over the landscape, those trails and dry streambeds may be hard to distinguish—until the rain comes. In the distance, just above the tan tanks on the left of the image, the Salton Sea serves as a reminder of how water and the desert interact.
My final photographic adventure of 2022 felt fittingly fell at dusk and felt like an achievement: flying my drone at the Salton Sea’s Bombay Beach, capturing the unique sculptures and setting.
Seeing that little wading bird approaching this tetrahedral sculpture seems a bit metaphorical for humans approaching our own futures: Coming up to something big and interesting and completely beyond our ability to properly predict/explain. Here’s to 2023!
“Apocalypse” may be a bit unfair to the Bohemian folks who have brought Bombay Beach back, but this spot on the shores of the Salton Sea nonetheless (particularly with the Jeep in the foreground) has a real “Mad Max” vibe.
Decaseconds 