Sometimes it's just ordained that a trip doesn't work out. It can be weather or an accident or a personal situation ... anything can happen to take the wind out of your sails. Unfortunately, this trip home had pretty much all of these. You already know about my troubles with the US government and my investment advisor. After a week of fighting and angry words I finally freed up my funds and put them in another financial institution. Because of all the trouble my residency in Crimea caused I'll not be telling them about my plans anymore. They just know I'm in Europe and will be in touch when I return.
I'm back in Crimea now, the trip over. I didn't add to this blog as I was too angry and too distracted to actually write anything coherent. Also, I made a conscious decision to not process many of my images as I've found the whole hassle of doing that is just too hard and the results too unpredictable to be of any use. All I did was fire up my computer when I could and download all the images I'd taken so there was at the very least 2 of every photo. I processed a few images just to make sure I had something usable and to check out the new Canon 6D and the Samyang 14 mm, f/2.8 lens. Both are fine and take some really nice pictures. Now that I'm home I've started cataloging and arranging what I have and am developing a plan to work through them. I've found some really great images and more than a few that are not worth keeping. More on this in later blogs.
Back to the trip. It rained a lot more this time due to El Nino. I love rainy days but only the beginning and the end of the storms. It's then that I see the most dramatic skies and the most spectacular sunsets. But cloudy skies for days on end don't produce nice images and rain isn't really all that good for the equipment. So I spent far too many days sitting in my truck watching rain drops slide down my windshield. I also had an accident ... not the truck but my body ... and that limited my mobility somewhat. I twisted my knee (and probably tore a ligament) so I'm now wearing a knee brace which helps somewhat but I'm not a mobile as I'd like. Add to that the wet weather kept my asthma from really getting better meaning I had difficulty hiking any great distances or tackling difficult terrain. Unfortunately, much of the really impressive geography in the Southwest is only accessible by hiking.
But the biggest detriment to my trip was my attitude. After the war with my investment adviser and the horrible start to my trip I just couldn't gin up the enthusiasm needed to really do a first rate job. My first stop, LA, didn't help very much as I spent far too much time driving from one place to another and then struggling to find a place to park the truck where it would be left alone. Too much of LA is either pay to park (and very expensive) or no parking so I had to drive around to find a place where I felt the truck was not at risk. Instead of the 3-4 weeks I'd intended to spend I split after only 6 days. Once I was on the road it became an issue of dealing with large crowds everywhere. This year is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service and they are pushing very aggressively to get people into the parks. It's working unfortunately. I often found the campgrounds filled and the parks overflowing with humanity. It's hard to shoot landscapes when they are overrun with bodies. I'll be spending far too much time this winter removing humans from my images. Not what I expected and a far cry from last year. So, by the half way point I was basically on autopilot, drifting from one park to the next without much enthusiasm. I wanted to go home with several weeks left. Not the way to make award winning images I'm afraid. But maybe I can save the effort with some really creative post work. We'll see.
Anyway, the trip ended up on June 3rd with a very long trip back to Crimea. That, at least, was reasonably uneventful. I've got my equipment back in running condition and will start working on images in a few days, once I'm over the horrible jet lag. I've been home for 4 days and am still unable to function very well. Guess old age is catching up with me at last. Once I'm OK, I have 13,868 photos to look at. Many are timelapse sequences and I've got a lot of work to get them ready. As I didn't spend as much time in LA as I'd planned, I'm not going to do an exclusively LA video but will weave in all my best photos and the timelapse into a 'best hits' show. Probably will call it 'Wonderous...' and there are some amazing images to put there. Will take a while to get that together and hopefully have something ready by the year's end. Wish me luck.
Very Large Array
If you take I-25 south from Albuquerque to Socorro and take rt. 60 west about 50 miles you'll get to the Very Large Array (VLA), a massive radio telescope. It's an amazing place with these huge radio dishes arranged in a 3-pointed star spread out across the desert. I spent several hours talking to the senior engineer for the facility and hope, next year, to be given permission to spend a night photographing the array against the milky way. I did a timelapse of the main array and one of the dishes as they twisted and turned to track a target billions of light years away. I'll certainly include the video in my best hits show. What's so interesting about the array is it's sensitivity. The engineer told me the system could detect a cellphone signal from Jupiter. Now that's sensitive! They are currently studying black holes and other radio sources and doing some really interesting science. Turns out the radio frequency bands are extremely important to see things that are obscured by dust at most other frequencies.
This photo is a panorama I took at sunset. I was as close to the antennas as possible (the camera's electronics can do a real number on the receivers). It was a gorgeous sunset and the antenna were pointed in just the right direction. I've already printed a hard copy of this image and it's spectacular. Hope to frame it later this year. So, here's hoping ET phones home...
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| Very Large Array - 35mm(ff),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0 |
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