Devil's Slide

About that hospitality ... or lack of it

When I'm on the road I literally live in my small pickup truck. I have a really nice ARB refrigerator that keeps all my perishables in good shape plus has room for a few bottles of iced tea to drink on those hot days. I'd be lost without it. I also have it arranged so I can move a few things into the cab and sleep in the back. Not the best accommodations but better than sleeping in the cab which I have to do sometimes. I have a nice air mattress and a good sleeping bag so I'm never cold or really uncomfortable. What I'm trying to say is my truck is my home when I'm on the road. And because I can't really afford a hotel room every night (rooms can be more than $100 in many places and sometimes much higher than that in Yellowstone or Grand Canyon) I have to stay in campgrounds if I'm in a national park and space is available or rest areas on major highways or even just find a place in a shopping center or mall lot if that's what's available. I've found SafeWay lots are very accommodating if the store is open 24/7 but some places are just not very friendly. For example, driving along rt. 1 in California it's not at all unusual to find "no camping" signs in every overlook or turnoff and "no overnight parking" is the rule almost everywhere. They try to make you very uncomfortable. I sort of understand ... they don't want homeless or drifters like me getting to cozy in those places. But for someone who is just doing his thing and taking pictures, it's really unfriendly and rude. I spent several weeks in California and almost every night I wasn't in a national park was an exercise in futility as I moved around trying to find any place to sleep.

I was really glad to be out of California when I crossed into Oregon. Always thought that state was laid back and accepting. WRONG! That state makes California look like a paradise. It was the only place where I actually got a citation from the local ... I don't even know what to call her ... constable who visited one of the rest areas every evening and took down license numbers, then returned the next morning and put a big orange tag on my window telling me I was abusing the "spirit" of the rest area by, of all things, sleeping there. It is called a rest area for a reason. One would think that they would not want me on the road at night, given how bad my vision has become and how hard it is for me to drive after dark. So I was really pissed the whole time I was in Oregon because of this one experience. Fortunately, the state police were more accommodating on the interstates and I was able to bed down for the night without hassles.

The overall impression one gets from driving around the country is people who are mobile, for whatever reason other than being a big rig driver, are really not welcome. Every state has rules about how long you can stay in a rest area every 24 hours. Cops don't usually enforce these rules very much but I've gotten shit from a cleaner on occasion because I haven't cleared out fast enough. All of this because I remember, as a kid, driving from California to St. Louis with my aunt and us just pulling over on the side of the road to get some sleep and no body gave a damn. This is another effect of the caustic culture in America now. It's really sad that we've become so intolerant.

Devil's Slide

Driving north on rt. 1 from Half Moon Bay toward San Francisco, you come to a big tunnel. Just before the tunnel is a stop light and parking lot for an area known as Devil's Slide. To the left as you enter you can see this large concrete structure perched precariously on a large rock overlooking the ocean. I'm not sure what this structure does ... it looks like maybe an old coastal defense bunker or something similar. It's abandoned so the taggers have been busy painting their "advertisements" all over it. The day I was there it was extremely windy so I had to get low to the ground just to keep from being blown over. It looked like a nice sunset was coming so I set up and waited. This is a standard process ... Photomatix and Lightroom. I'm a bit ambivalent about the image ... I think it's interesting but not something I would ever want to sell. Just a very interesting shot of an unusual structure and a nice sunset.

Devil's Slide - 20mm,f/20,1/13 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

There was this bear...

Yellowstone has been on my wish list since I started this whole process several years ago. Not only is it the oldest national park in the world but it is also among the most spectacular. They've got just about everything ... wild animals, spectacular scenery, geothermal features out the wazoo (over 10,000) ... there's something for everyone. I'd been intending to go there earlier in the trip but was told that the park was mostly closed due to heavy snow so it would have been a waste of time and money to try getting there. But I had time at the end of the trip so I made the 1000 mile drive from Albuquerque to the park in the middle of May. Spent over a week in Grand Teton and Yellowstone and it was worth every minute I invested. I could have easily spent another week and still not visited all the areas. I took almost 3000 images in that week, almost half of all the images I took for the whole trip. It was amazing and made the cycle worth the effort. Had I not gone I would have written off the entire trip as a waste.

One of the attractions is the big animals. They have buffalo, elk, moose, bear, wolves, coyotes ... in abundance. I was in Mammoth Hot Springs for 5 days and almost every day there was a large herd of buffalo living in the center of town. I also ran into them on the road several times, so close I could have rolled down my window and stroked their flanks. Not a good idea of course because buffalo are know for their hair trigger tempers and they can destroy a car in a heartbeat. Also ran into several bears including a mother and her cub that took up residence on the side of the road and disrupted traffic for several days. It's almost comical to watch people when they see bears. They slam on the brakes and pull off the road, oblivious to traffic and anything else around them. They will literally chase a bear with their cameras trying to get a shot. Of course, only an idiot chases a bear and there are "accidents" every year between people and bears ... the bear almost always wins unfortunately. Also, unfortunately, quite a few bears are killed or injured by cars driving too fast on the road. There's a reason why the speed limits are 35-45 mph on roads that look like they can easily handle 60. It's all about the animals.

Anyway, the last day in Yellowstone I wanted to take a sunrise at Yellowstone Lake. That required me to get up really early, like 4 am, and drive down past Old Faithful to a town called West Thumb which is on the lake. Coming down the hill above town I see a good spot to set up my camera so I hang a quick u-turn and park off the road. Set up the tripod and camera and start shooting. After a few minutes I hear loud billowing coming from the valley below but don't think anything off it. Figure it's a moose or buffalo. Keep shooting when suddenly, there's a loud crashing noise and a medium size black bear, probably a female, comes blasting out of the trees not 50 feet from me and goes barreling across the road and down the slope on the other side. Not even sure she saw me but she was definitely in a big hurry to get somewhere. I guess I should have had a "holy shit" moment but I can't say I was really too excited. Heart rate barely changed and other than being startled by all the noise I had almost no reaction. Since the bear was between me and my truck I'm not sure what I could have done other than start yelling like crazy and flapping my coat. I would have used my tripod to keep the bear at bay so I could maneuver to my truck but that would have been the extent of my efforts. Had the bear really wanted to attack me I wouldn't have been able to do much. But man, that was definitely one of the biggest rushes I had. Definitely an interesting way to end my trip. Only wish I'd been able to point the camera and get a picture. Now that would have been something to capture!

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

One of the attractions in Yellowstone is the "Grand Canyon". Not nearly as large as the one in Arizona it is still pretty spectacular. The Yellowstone River has, over millions of years, carved a nice ditch through the soft rock which is several hundred feet deep and very impressive. I was there in the late afternoon and, fortunately, the place was pretty much deserted so I was able to set up my tripod and get a good panorama. I really like the drama it captures, of the darkening sky and the cliffs and the river far below. This is a pretty standard process, HDR in Photomatix, blending in Photoshop and finishing in Lightroom. All I can say if, if you have some extra time on your hands, please make a trip to the Northwest corner of Wyoming and spend some time exploring Grand Teton and Yellowstone. You won't be disappointed.

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone - 24mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Big Sur #1

So What Happened...

You are all very aware of my issues with money and Crimea. The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), has a stranglehold on the Crimea and refuses to let any money into the place no matter the need. I've tried every method known to man, including VISA, Western Union and SWIFT, to no avail. I have to resort to the most draconian methods to get living expenses to my family. What's really frustrating is the folks at OFAC told me directly that living money for personal expenses was OK with them and yet they make it nearly impossible to do just that. This choking of Crimea has reduced the place to near poverty for most as there are only local and rather ineffective banks with little money and no services other than paying utilities which they charge far too much for.

Well, this trip home I tried to send money to the daughter of my wife's cousin, who just graduated university in Ukraine and needed some money to rent a flat and buy some furniture. I figured, wrongly, that SWIFT would be able to handle this as Ukraine is not under any sanctions. Unfortunately, the girl isn't totally aware of the nuances of OFAC control and she listed her home address in Crimea by mistake. Her family lives in Simferopol and, due to the way Ukraine deals with college students and the fact that they still claim Crimea as part of the country, her home address was listed as Crimea, part of Ukraine. Students don't have addresses in the town where they attend school and the bank required her 'real' home address which was Crimea. This little slip seems to have caused OFAC to decide I was trying to send money to Crimea and they blocked the transaction. Now, what really gets my hackles up is the fact that no one bothered to let me know that the transaction was blocked. For 4 weeks my bank kept telling me the money was in Ukraine when, as far as I could tell, it was in an account with OFAC. After 4 weeks of frustration on my side and on the Ukraine side I finally went to my bank and cancelled the whole transfer. It took 10 days to find the money and bring it back. Still don't have a complete explanation of where the money went and why it didn't get to Ukraine but that's the way these government agencies work. They do whatever they want and if it blows up your life ... too bad. There is no accountability and this clusterf**k of an operation has so much power to destroy lives and countries. They are the group that starved 500,000 kids to death in Iraq because they decided that medicines and food had military applications and therefore they were not allowed. Evil personified.

Unfortunately, this fiasco diverted my attention for over a month and kept me from setting up the website for my business and from getting my image sales started. By the time the dust settled on this disaster it was just too late to do anything. So the business is not yet running and there is no website. I hope to get it setup while I'm still in Crimea this time so there's something to sell when I get back in country next spring. I hope...

Big Sur #1

One of my bucket list items for this cycle was to spend time in Big Sur. It is such a spectacular place with cliffs and big surf and too many places to photograph. That was my intention ... but the weather had other ideas. The massive storms last spring washed out huge sections of rt. 1 on the coast, closing everything from Ragged Point in the south to Big Sur Station in the north ... essentially the entire Big Sur area. So I was reduced to driving as far as the closure at Ragged Point, then backtracking to rt. 101 and going north to where I could get to rt. 1 and driving south to Big Sur Station. I got a nice taste of the area but a thorough expedition has to wait for another cycle. However, I do have a not so nice memory of that trip. I stopped in a McDonalds in Salinas before turning west toward the coast. I ordered a chicken sandwich. After taking a few bites I noticed the lettuce was bad, covered with black spots and had a not so pleasant smell. I took it off the sandwich and stupidly ate the rest. I should have taken it back to the counter but was in a hurry to get back on the road. By the time I hit Big Sur Station my stomach was starting to rock and roll and a few miles north I was forced to find a place to park and be really sick. It was a miserable night on the side of the road and I didn't feel even a bit better until the sun was coming up. That's the first time McDonalds sold me bad food and it may be the last time I ever buy from them. Every time I went into a McD to check the Internet my stomach started rocking. Something like that sticks with you for a long time.

Anyway, before I got sick I was able to find a couple of nice spots to photograph. I'm not sure exactly where this location is, but it was just north of the town of Big Sur. Storm was brewing and surf was up big time so the image came out really well. This is a panorama made from HDR images. Lots of work to get everything right. Still a little rough in spots but I wanted to get the image out there so everyone could see it. Enjoy.

Big Sur 1 - 24mm,f/20,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Joshua Tree Sunset

Cycle #3 is over...

I've been silent now for almost 3 months. I was in America most of the time, doing my normal spring traveling. I had an agenda, as I outlined in previous posts, and most of that when in the garbage. I'll cover, in more detail, most of my trip in future posts but do want to give an overview of the adventure here. I guess the best way to characterize this trip is ... what a mess! Those rains I talked about got me big time and much of the early part of my trip was spent driving in downpours and sitting in parking lots watching water drops run down my truck's windows. It was horrendously bad for the first 6 weeks. There were landslides that closed all of Big Sur and much of the area around Stinson Beach north of San Francisco. There were also closure on the bluffs above the Golden Gate Bridge so it was almost impossible to get any images from that vantage point. I was also snowed out of Crater Lake in Oregon and much of the coast there was so wet it was almost impossible to take pictures. I drove almost 12K miles but got only 8K images to show for all that work. There were days where I didn't even take the cameras out of their bag. It was just so miserable. I had to abandon part of my trip up the coast, leaving at Portland instead of Seattle, because everything was so wet. I'd look at the weather forecast and see 5 days of rain, 2 days of good weather and another 5 days of rain. It was really depressing. So I spent a few days in the Portland area, mostly in the Colombia River Gorge, and then headed south toward places where I knew the weather would be more accommodating. I spent a few days in Yosemite and another few days in Death Valley where I and my gear had a chance to dry out. But even Yosemite was a problem as rt. 120 from the north was closed due to a road collapse. On the good side, the closure cut way back on visitors to the park and I was able to get campsites for all the nights I was there but they had lost all internet access so we had to get up early every day and stand in line to pay for a site. These disruptions were a constant in all the national parks. This year, for some reason, things just didn't seem to be working very well. It was very disruptive not only for my photography but for my communications with my family. I was often out of touch for days at a time which caused my wife and daughter great anxiety. But somehow I persevered and finished the trip on May 30th. Flew from Albuquerque to LA to Moscow to Simferopol in just under 24 hours, arriving late in the evening on the 31st. I've been home for just over a week and am still struggling to acclimate to the 10 hour time change. Flying west to east is really hard, even when you are young and healthy but is brutal for my old bones. I suspect it will be another week before I can sleep through the night and stay awake during the day.

I did meet some interesting people along the way. My wife had advised me to not talk about living in Russia but I didn't think most Americans really cared about my living arrangements. So everyone who asked that basic question ... "Where are you from?" ... got the full details of my life in Crimea. I think only one person was upset by that. Most people thought that was interesting and some even wanted to know more. I spent lots of time talking about America and Trump and what was happening to our country. Can't say I talked to even one Trump supporter. The vast majority thought he was crazy and out of control and couldn't quite understand how we had elected such a clown. They also, almost to a person, had nothing kind to say about Clinton. The universal consensus was both of them were worthless. That gave me some hope for the future but not a great deal.

On the technical side, my gear worked like it was supposed to. I had zero mechanical issues with my cameras and relatively minor issues with the truck. This year was emissions testing time and the truck failed due to it's throwing errors out of the emissions system. That required a trip to the repair shop where they found the EGR system wasn't working right. Turns out a hose had gone brittle and cracked, allowing air to leak into the vacuum system that controlled the valve. Also had an issue with the main drive pulley on the serpentine belt so that had to be replaced. Cost almost $400 but the old gal ran much better afterwards. Also had a punctured tire, probably when I was in Page, AZ, and a slow leak. I had picked up a nail somewhere and it had badly damaged the steel belts so the tire had to be replaced. That was another $79. But considering how much driving I do and some of the miserable places I take that truck, I can't complain about this too loudly. It is 17 years old and some things do wear out unfortunately. I suspect I'll have some major repairs to undertake next year too. All part of the process.

Made some preliminary contacts to begin the commercial side of my business. Found a framing shop/gallery in Albuquerque that has tentatively agreed to sell my stuff. I was going to get that started this trip but other issues (later) got in the way so it has to wait  until the spring. Also had an interesting encounter with SmugMug, the image hosting website, that I'll talk about more in another post. It was an interesting experience for sure.

Anyway, that's the trip in a nutshell. There was a great deal of frustration this time, both with the weather and with all the roadblocks that are being thrown up against people who work and live out of their vehicles. Some states are more tolerant of this lifestyle than others and the most draconian will surprise you. I'll devote an entire post to this issue as I think it's important. A lifestyle is being strangled by those who demand conformity.

Joshua Tree Sunset

One of my first stops was in Joshua Tree NP near LA. I'd always planned to stop there but it was just too out of the way to divert for until this year. I made a conscious effort to go there as my cousin raved about the place. After several missed turns and one or two diversions, I arrived at the park. It is a very interesting place for sure. The signature draw is the Joshua Tree, a desert tree that is unusual and very ... ugly. Can't say I find them all that wonderful to photograph directly but I did some experimenting with back lighting at sunset to get some acceptable images. There are also lots of interesting rock formations and, if one looks carefully enough, lots of interesting plants that fly below the radar. Today's image is one of those.

The first day I was there I spent much of the day just wandering around several of the major attractions. I was scoping the place out, looking for interesting angles and images. I though about photographing the rock formations but generally find they don't translate too well into usable images. You need something more organic to generate interest. Anyway, I was wandering around among the rocks and started to notice that many plants were growing in cracks and crevices and created very impressive contrasts between the stone and the green needles. Rocks in Joshua Tree of very strange ... they look like they formed out of shells of dead marine creatures. They were very rough and give an amazing texture that I though would contrast well against some of the plants. This was my idea at that point. I kept wandering around until I found exactly what I was looking for. There was a pinon tree, very old, growing in a large crack in a big rock. It had been bonsai'd, stunted by the lack of water and nutrition, so was quite small and yet very old. The trunk was gnarled and twisted, giving the impression that this was a tree that had some serious history. And yet, it was only a bit larger than my camera and tripod. It was an interesting setup (see below) as the background didn't really contribute

to the image, being composed mostly of scrub brush and dead stuff. I had to get just the right angle so the tree was highlighted against the sky and was framed by the setting sun's yellow light. You can see the lengths I went to setting up the shot. Fortunately, the sun cooperated as did the sky, giving me just enough clouds to get a nice presentation.

I took a long series of bracketed shots as the sun set, looking for just that perfect combination of light and shadow. I probably sat there for an hour waiting for things to come together. And, fortunately, they did. The image below is the final result. I love the contrasts and how shadow and light interplay. My cousins thought the tree was much bigger and were amazed when I sent them the setup picture. There's not a lot of processing here, just HDR in Photomatix and finishing in Lightroom. I may run these images through RayaPro, the suite of actions for Photoshop from Jimmy McIntyre, once I get my feet wet with that process. He shy's away from HDR because of the distortions it creates and uses blending to create some spectacular images. I'll give it try in a few weeks and post the results here for comparison. Anyway, here's "Joshua Tree Sunset" for your viewing pleasure. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.

Joshua Tree Sunset - 23mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0