I just finished posting close to 60 photographs (in the
new work section of my web site) taken in the Eastern Sierra over the course of about a week this past August. To go along with the images, I thought I'd share some random thoughs on the trip.
I spent most of the week camping alone. That was both a good thing and a bad thing. It was nice to get away, and it was really nice to talk to other people again when it was over.
I got the last campsite at Rock Creek Lake. Lucky? Maybe. But it had no shade, which turned out to be a problem: dawn and dusk were spent doing photography, and the daylight hours were supposed to be spent "lounging" around the campsite. The days instead became a never-ending search for shade.
On the first morning, I woke up well before sunrise in order to eat and get organized before heading off to Little Lakes Valley, one of the most amazingly beautiful spots in California if not the world. It was COLD...my water bottle was about half frozen. I turned on my stove, got some water boiling for oatmeal, huddled close to the burner for warmth--and then my stove exploded! Luckily I escaped injury, but there's nothing like a propane explosion in the dark to wake you up. And luckily I was able to rig up my small propane heater for use as a makeshift stove, so I had fairly warm food for breakfast and dinner the remainder of the trip.
This is the first photography trip where I took my laptop. Dumping my memory cards after each session not only gave me room to shoot many more photographs, but I had time to organize all the files and even pre-process many images, saving lots of hours in front of the computer when I got home. However, one of the two batteries failed almost immediately (maybe due to the cold?), so the laptop wasn't utilized as much as I had wished.
I did a lot of thinking during the days, and a lot of writing in my journal--most of it about photography. Originally I had planned to "clean up" the essays on photography and try to get them published in a good photography magazine like Lenswork or (...???), but instead they will eventually end up being posted here in this blog.
One of my memory cards failed on the trip, while shooting in the aspen forest around Iris Meadow at dawn. About 30 photographs were lost to the ether. This is only the second time in almost 5 years of digital photography where I've had a memory card fail on me--and coincidentally, both times were at dawn at a temperature between 30 and 35 degrees. This time, I was able to reformat the card when I got home (it wouldn't reformat on my laptop--different operating system maybe?) and the card is now fuly functional again.
As if the stove situation wasn't bad enough, on the final day of the trip, my car exploded. Well, it didn't actually "explode"; maybe "melted down" is a better description. The car was on it's last leg anyway, and had a number of issues that needed to be addressed when I got home. But about 12 miles north of Mammoth, all hell started to break loose. I managed to limp into Bishop with a broken axle and blown power stearing pump without assistance from a tow truck. A new car was in the cards anyway, this just forced my hand by a few weeks/months.
This trip was a combination of visiting new areas (the old buildings at Red Mountain and the charcoal kilns at Owens Lake, for example) as well as areas I had been to before (such as Little Lakes Valley), but hopefully with a new prespective on the old. At the conclusion of the trip, I had deemed it a failure photographically. After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I realized my initial conclusion was probably poisoned by the bad memories of the propane stove exploding in my face and my car's axle giving out underneath me. In the final analysis, the trip produced a bounty of fantastic images--some of which you can see on my web site.
[ photograph above: Iris Meadow, 2004 ]
