Chasing the Light

“When I first visited India, I was stunned by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds… I had been seeing the world in black & white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant Technicolor.” (Keith Bellows; National Geographic Society)

I made my first photographic visit to Rajasthan earlier this year and Keith Bellows’ quote above says it all. It’s a sensation a minute….women in bright saris, men with long beards and lined faces, colorful turbans, cattle roaming freely (and depositing freely!), camel herders, street urchins, Sadhus, snake charmers, local markets, massive cities, quaint villages, scooters, tuk-tuks, street vendors…..and the list goes on and on.

Sometimes I felt I was walking around inside a Van Gogh painting….splashes of color were everywhere. These two windows on this large wall were painted green and then surrounded by an outline of blue with the remainder of the wall left unpainted. Did they run out of blue?

Chasing the Light-9 — Need some Cauliflower?

Not sure why….but I was surprised by the variety and voluminous offerings of vegetables in local markets. Meat based meals were a much larger part of local diets than I anticipated but vegetables were still central to much of Indian cuisine. 30% of Indians are vegetarians with the remaining 70% consuming fish or meat as a normal part of their everyday diet.

We came across this man smoking a cigarette while he was waiting for a local bus. He noticed us raising our cameras towards him and was eager to be photographed. He smoked continuously while we all intensely snapped away trying to get the smoke “just right”.

Everything works here…..the background is sufficiently blurred, the colors pop because of the foggy soft light and the smoke adds a lot of character to the portrait.

As a developing country, India’s level of sophistication in many infrastructure arenas is wildly eclectic. In some places you’ll find the latest in computerized transportation technology and in others a way station or midpoint on the way. This man is loading his cargo from a donkey cart to a bus and somehow the juxtaposition of using a transportation mode that is at least 2,000 years old in conjunction with a modern motor vehicle informs much about India’s developing economy.

On a wandering around visit to a small village, this man invited us to his home for some tea and some Indian hospitality. This is really the raison d’être for travel. It’s always thrilling to see legendary landmarks wherever you go but connecting on a person to person basis changes your relationship to the country and its people and allows you to rise above all of the formal government to government folderol.

These kids were in the same village and it’s a common tale among photographers that if you walk down the street with a camera in a developing foreign land you will soon be followed by children wanting their photo taken. One of my favorite gimmicks is to get them all to jump up at the same time which releases any inhibitions they may have and I am able to capture a “true” moment. And of course you always get the one kid who can’t follow directions! The payoff comes when you show them the LCD image in back of the camera and they break out giggling.

I enjoy wandering around the streets or back alleys of new places and waiting for a scene, a person or moment that captures the essence of the place I’m visiting. It’s almost the opposite of a normal tourist experience where one wanders around appreciating the “big picture” and the entire landscape; where one looks for an integrated experience with a new place. I’m usually focusing on something smaller and narrower…details and scenes within the scene.

This woman was with a few friends getting into a local Tuk-Tuk. Her friends were unremarkable but she had an exotic interesting look and when she stared right back at me I snapped the shutter.

Indian cities and towns are filled with local shopkeepers and craftsmen who offer their goods and services in open air shops and small cubbies. This fellow was sharpening knives for his customers.

These ladies were available to apply a traditional Indian skin tattoo practice for their customers. It’s actually probably not a tattoo but more of a skin painting technique.

Looking closely, this clothes line contains both traditional Indian saris and shawls plus jeans and other clothing familiar to all western developed countries.

This fellow is a greeter at a local hotel and I persuaded him to pose in this scene which needed some local color.

Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button in the middle of the right side of this page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button.

Frank Binder

Shrewsbury, MA

I frequently daydream about new adventures and places to visit. And in these wandering around (mostly in my car) daydreams they are always places that are a bit untrod, underexplored, a bit unknown, possessing untouristed natural splendor, sport a vibe that has not quite caught up to our 24 hour a day news cycle, and have the ability to expand what I think I know about the world.

Of course on a more fundamental level it always helps if they are economic and easy to get to. So I was thinking Canada…..so near and the Looney so weak against the Dollar. So I’m thinking Nova Scotia and then I read about the new spectacular world rated golf course built on the Cabot Trail. Once you are at an airport and the baggage claim people are unloading hoards of golf travel bags…..you are no longer at a place “a bit unknown”.

That’s how I spotted Newfoundland…..further north of the more popular Atlantic provinces and I knew hardly anything about it….perfect!

Having pronounced Newfoundland…NEW-fund-lund all my life but being uncertain about it, I asked our car rental clerk how to pronounce the province’s name. Here it is from a native……New-fa-LAND.

St John’s, Newfoundland’s capital, is a vibrant small city boasting a large protected harbor filled with all kinds of shipping much of which resembled the Atlantic Kingfisher. St John’s size and Newfoundland’s population seemed inconsistent with the substantial amount of shipping capacity and logistics at the port. It turns out that much of this capacity is there to service the oil drilling platforms sitting out in the Atlantic off the eastern coast of Newfoundland.

The city of approximately 100,000 people, sports several long residential thoroughfares on which the row houses are painted very bright colors.

Many of these homes have riotous displays of color in planters and hanging baskets. You’ll notice the mailbox design showing off the Jelly Bean coloring of the homes.

Because of restrictive fishing regulations on fish and catch sizes, the industry in Newfoundland is substantially smaller than in previous decades. Cod is still a prized catch and served in every restaurant in town in virtually every preparation imaginable. Fisherman are concentrating on the ocean species that are still abundant and have commercial appeal…..Snow Crabs are a huge harvest.

Cape Spear is the easternmost point in North America. The above image is the old de-commissioned lighthouse with the tip of new lighthouse seen in the distance.

One of the many reasons for visiting Newfoundland are the nature and ecological reserves. On the day we arrived at the Cape St. Marys Ecological reserve the jutting cliffs visible in the above image hosted over 400,000 birds, the large majority being Northern Gannets. If you look closely you can see some of the 5,000 birds in flight over the reserve.

The local ranger told us that there were over 60,000 nesting pairs of Gannets who built their nests with ample supplies of the local grasses. These birds are adept fishers and circle above the water until they spy prey and then dive at a high rate of speed (up to 60 mph) to capture their lunch.

Gannets are monogamous. After raising a single offspring, they will part until the next mating season and then re-connect to raise another chick.

A number of other avian species reside at the Reserve and raise chicks during mating season.

One of the major photographic pursuits in Newfoundland is photographing Atlantic Puffins and you can see why from the above image. They are impossibly adorable! Because they usually reside on islands, photographing them from a distance can be a challenge and one needs really big lenses. However, patience is a key virtue because if you sit quietly in the viewing areas, they will come visit you…..at one point as I was sitting quietly one landed less than a foot away from me…..amazingly… too close to focus with my big lens.

And once one of them lands, it signals to others that this is a safe landing area and many of them will follow. At one point there were 25 of them all within 20 ft. Only 10 inches tall, they are endlessly fascinating.

Frank Binder

Shrewsbury, MA

Long international flights leave ample time for ruminations and contemplations and my Nairobi to Istanbul flight last year accorded me seven hours to think about how I was going to soak in and appreciate 2500 years of history in a 3 ½ day photographic journey to what is undisputedly one of the world’s great cities. Many of the currents and themes of world history run through and were vividly shaped by the events in this crossroads metropolis.

Known as Byzantium prior to the 4th century, the city was the western terminus of the ancient Silk Road trade route linking the Mediterranean to China and Japan.

At its modern inception in the 4th century, Constantinople (named after the Roman Emperor Constantine) was the eastward extension and new epicenter of the Roman Empire and adopted what became the Eastern Orthodox version of Christianity.

The Hagia Sophia, constructed in 535 AD upon the order of Emperor Justinian I, was the gleaming focal point of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the largest church in the world for over 1,000 years (until the Cathedral of Seville was erected in 1520).

In 1453 Mehmed “The Conqueror” led a conquest of the city by the Ottoman Turks and converted the Cathedral to a Mosque. The Ottomans removed all the christian icons and attempted to obliterate all of the christian murals. For reasons unknown, a number of the original christian murals…some now well over 1,000 years old….remain in the building.

Looking at the above photograph, you can clearly see a remnant of the Cathedral’s christian origins in the mural of the Virgin Mary just above the upper windows. You’ll also observe the Islamic placards on the left and right side of the image. The Mosque/Cathedral was converted to a museum in the 1930s and is today the city’s most visited site.

The Bosphorus Strait running through Istanbul is the dividing line between Europe and Asia and is the only outlet from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. All of the sea-going traffic to and from Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia and the northern portion of Turkey pass through this straight so it is always clogged with freighters.

Just as we sailed past this mosque the late afternoon call to prayer was being broadcast over the loudspeakers located on the two visible minarets. It was a haunting moment at this time of day with this light.

Mornings were cool and these scenes of small fires surrounded by early morning workmen warming their hands were ubiquitous.

The city is quite hilly and spreads out into Europe and Asia.

I was fortunate to be with an Istanbul photographer who knew the back alleys. This jewelry maker’s machine shop was in a maze of small industrial shops that I would never have found on my own.

I really like this street portrait ….the graffiti on the wall, the cigarette, his cap and the flaming fire. It all really works.

The Romanesque style Galata Tower was built as Christea Turris (Tower of Christ) in 1348 during an expansion of the Genoese colony in Constantinople. The Galata Tower was the tallest building in Constantinople at 220 ft. when it was built in 1348.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque is a historic mosque in the city. A popular tourist site, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque continues to function as a mosque as men still kneel in prayer on the mosque’s lush red carpet after the call to prayer. The Blue Mosque, as it is popularly known, was constructed between 1609 and 1616 during the rule of Ahmed I. Its Külliye contains Ahmed’s tomb, a madrasah and a hospice. Hand-painted blue tiles adorn the mosque’s interior walls, and at night the mosque is bathed in blue as lights frame the mosque’s five main domes, six minarets and eight secondary domes.(Wikipedia)

Frank Binder

Shrewsbury, MA

Ethiopia is such a remarkable country….a land of astonishing physical beauty, the only place on Earth with the spectacular Gelada baboon, a country where our earliest ancestors roamed, a place with ties to King Solomon and events in the Old Testament, and home to some of the most colorful ancient tribes on Earth.

Lucy, one of our earliest hominid ancestors, was discovered in 1974 in northeastern Ethiopia by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson. Named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” Lucy was dated to be 3.2 million years old (that’s a lot of candles on her birthday!), stood about 3 1/2 ft. tall and weighed about 65 pounds. Subsequently other older ancestors dating back almost 7 million years have been found in Ethiopia but none is as renowned as Lucy.

In the country’s Omo valley, indigenous tribes have been painting their bodies with pulverized minerals for millenia. In the Lower Omo Valley of southwest Ethiopia, eastern South Sudan and around Lake Turkana in north Kenya reside over 500,000 indigenous, tribal people. Many are agro-pastoralists who live close to the river or lake during the dry season but return to the grasslands when the rains come. The young men have the responsibility of grazing the cattle and they have long slathered on clay to prevent sunburn. Colors are used to designate position, for ritual, to ward off illness, to attract the opposite sex, to associate with family, a tribe or an animal, and in the last ten years… to impress tourists and attract photographers.

Photographers have been coming to the Omo to be able to capture portrait images like this one. She is the wife of a young man who acted as my guide during our visit to this village.

This is a natural light image. I placed her just inside the entrance to their abode and let the outside light softly light her face. I concentrated on ensuring that her closest eye was in perfect focus.

A few other helpful portrait hints….Keep the background simple and neutral. And side lighting (rather than direct head on lighting) gives a portrait more drama and character.

This mother is rocking a traditional look for women in her village. Her leather garments, snail-shell necklace and braided hair treated with local ochre colored mud are the hallmarks of the her Hamer heritage.

These girls and women in a remote Dassanech village are working hard grinding their local grain into flour.

This young boy getting a bath illustrates the water challenges of the village and of the region in general. Obtaining water is one of the major daily activities undertaken by women in Africa. This woman likely carried a twenty gallon container of water from the local river ( a 1/2 mile away) to her home. And most likely did it by balancing the container on her head! Her use of the water bottle to bathe her child is simply a judicious way of using the water that she worked so hard to obtain.

In some respects women are the pack mules of their families. This woman is returning to her village from the local town with her purchases of straw and other sundry items. I personally witnessed her walk 1 1/2 miles to this point and followed her with my eyes as she seemed to walk into infinity on this road. She wasn’t pleased that I took this photograph.

A face that's been lived in — A face that’s been lived in

In our journey through Ethiopia, we overnighted in a small town and my colleague Dave and I decided to amble through the downtown area to see if we could stumble into anything interesting. We came across a small coffee cafe (Ethiopia is one of the coffee capitals of the world) and this fellow enjoying an afternoon cup of Joe. He was gracious enough to allow me to photograph him. It’s one of my favorite portraits from my trip. I love everything about this portrait….from the jaunty way his hat balances on his head to his character lined face.

Taken only a few minutes after the portrait above. As we wandered through town we eventually collected 25-30 children who followed us in our little photographic sojourn. We loved taking photos of them as they were so excited when we showed them the LCD images on the back of our cameras.

I was able to gather these five for a group portrait. Notice the facial expressions and reactions to being photographed. The two girls on the left (sisters) were very cool and collected, the young girl and boy in the middle are excited and the young girl on the right is nonplussed.

Such an incredibly photogenic set of subjects! The Omo Valley and it’s traditional and colorful set of tribes is a photographers delight. But the traditions and very existence of the ways of life are under stress for a variety of reasons. There are economic development water projects that threaten the downstream lifeblood flow of the Omo River, a growing tourist activity that threatens to overwhelm and change the local ways, and finally the normal march of progress that improves people’s lives.

Finally one last portrait. Notice the piece taken out of his upper ear…..most likely the result of a coming of age ceremony as a young man.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

During my recent photographic journey to Ethiopia (with intrepid African Photographer Piper McKay), our small band of photographers climbed into Simien National Park which contains Ethiopia’s highest peak, Ras Dejen at 15,000 ft. Over millions of years the area’s plateaus have eroded to form precipitous cliffs and deep gorges of exceptional natural beauty. While we appreciated the spectacular surroundings, we were there to photograph some of the park’s most famous residents, Gelada baboons. And I couldn’t have been more excited….after all how often do you see Italian ice cream loving baboons?

The identifying mark of these wonderful animals is a red heart on their chests which cause some to call them “bleeding heart monkeys”. They are actually monkeys in genus…the last surviving branch of the Gelada ancestral tree.

Geladas spend much of their morning grooming each other to make sure that they are looking good as they venture out onto the grasslands to feed. Here a female grooms a sister Gelada as a little one is sheltered.

Gelada are herbivores but have very large predator like teeth and can look fierce when they draw back their lips and show off their bicuspids.

untitled-5 — Just back from getting my hair done!

We saw several large troupes of Geladas each day with each group being at least one hundred animals. To protect themselves from predators, Geladas spend their nights perched on steep cliffsides and emerge at dawn each morning as they make their way up and over cliff rims to spend the day socializing and feeding.

Each troupe featured large numbers of youngsters from newborns to teenage equivalents. The babies often travel on Mom’s back and resemble jockies riding in a race.

If you remain still and unthreatening the Geladas will become comfortable with your presence. This duo was within 6 ft. as they passed by.

The troupe would move over large distances during the day in search of pristine grasses. I found a favorite photographic tactic which was to plant myself on the ground in the direction the troupe was heading and wait for them to arrive. Soon I was surrounded by animals who completely ignored me as I furiously snapped my shutter.

Mothers keep their newborns very close and are wary. I found that if I was quiet and moved slowly I could get quite close to this pair and spent 10-15 minutes photographing them after they came to ignore me.

These two young boys followed us one day in hopes of selling their portrait to us. I couldn’t resist. Those blankets weren’t for show…it was cold at 10,000 ft!

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

“Baby, you know I ain’t no Queen of Sheba” (Thing called Love; Bonnie Raitt). I didn’t go to Ethiopia to discover Sheba but rather to photograph ancient religious ceremonies, unique Gelada baboons and native indigenous tribes. But after engaging our guide Danny, with rudimentary questions about Ethiopia’s history, I was sucked into the quasi-historical tale of Ethiopia’s early Queen traveling to meet Israel’s King Solomon and spawning a son Menelik who Ethiopians regard as the founder and first Emperor of 10^th century BC Ethiopia. Menelik is customarily credited for bringing the original Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia where believers say it currently resides in an Aksum church.

As if this wasn’t a dizzying enough historical journey, Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s last reigning emperor claimed to be the 225th descendent of King Solomon. Wow!…..my photographic journey had turned into an Indiana Jones script!

These traditional beliefs intertwining the Old Testament and the Solomonic dynasty with the fourth century introduction of Christianity form the basis of today’s Eastern Orthodox Ethiopian Church. Although Ethiopians consider Axsum to be the heart of Christianity in Ethiopia, the modest town of Lalibella is its soul.

For Lalibella is home to eleven rock-hewn churches which are a wondrous testament to what ancient Ethiopians were able to accomplish with a few hand tools and a mission to honor their faith. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the churches were not built… but rather sculpted from top to bottom from huge monolithic red blocks of volcanic rock .

St George’s church is the cleanest example of the task. Built around the turn of the first millennium, laborers working from top to bottom, initially excavated all of the solid rock around the church. This was the easy part. Then they hollowed out the church from bottom to top, created windows, steps, and various other decorative touches inside the church….all with simple hand tools.

The Christmas Eve ceremonial mass held in St. Mary’s church was a stunning cross-pollination of traditional Christian rites and world-class performance art. Attended by thousands of religious pilgrims and performed by hundreds of white-robed priests, the pageantry in the form of singing, chanting, and cavalcades of umbrella toting processionals went on for many hours into the night and culminated in a final regal morning processional by the senior prelates outside the church.

Lalibella is a dusty town of about 20,000 inhabitants in northern Ethiopia. During the church’s Christmas celebrations 50,000 religious pilgrims, many of whom walk long distances, attend the ceremonies. Because of differences between the Ethiopan calendar and the more commonly used Gregorian calendar, Christmas in Ethiopia occured this year on January 7th.

Many of the churches are connected with tunnels and trenches and throngs of pilgrims use these pathways to visit the churches after the ceremonies conclude.

The light flowing through this portal lit up this young girl in a very arresting way.

Most of the pilgrims take advantage of specially designated camping areas around town where large sprawling masses of families alight and whose daily life is on display as we walked through the camping areas. In a short time we saw livestock being slaughtered for the nightly meal, women cooking in large pots over open fires, large prayer groups, and frolicking children everywhere.

This pilgrim climbed onto an elevated perch in a small maintenance building and used it to survey campground life.

This is a common scene as women (and it was all women) prepare meals for their families over open fires. This looks to be a very common Ethiopian dish of meat with shiro and berbere spices.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

To quote Ken Burns…..National Parks are the country’s best idea. The breadth of the country’s national park experience varies from the flat swampy bird filled Everglades NP to the ice fields of Glacier NP to the spectacular cliffs and spires of Grand Canyon NP and everything in between.

If you’re into canyons and rock formations, southern Utah contains five national parks with some of the best hiking and photography anywhere on the planet.

Canyonlands NP contains one of the most famous arches in the country; Mesa Arch which has been photographed millions of times. The shot above is not particularly original but it’s on most landscape photographers bucket list since the light from the sunrise reflects off of the bottom surface of the arch and brilliantly lights up the underside of the arch. The brilliant red/orange glow on the underside of the arch lasts 15 minutes before it melts away for the rest of the day.

Obviously one needs to get here before sunrise to get in position to take the shot and capture the sun star in the image. I got there an hour before sunrise ( I needed a headlamp to walk the trail) and was greeted by 20 other tripod equipped photographers when I arrived. The arch is less than 20 ft. across and getting positioned in such a crowd takes some patience and a sharing attitude as you will undoubtedly be crossing tripod legs and bumping each other frequently.

As the most popular arch in Arches NP, Delicate Arch draws tens of thousands of visitors each year….and rightly so! There were probably 50 people viewing and taking photos of the arch the afternoon I was there. As you can see in the image, the setting sun casts beautiful light on the arch in the last hour of the day and gives the arch the rich red glow that makes the image. Of course having the snow-capped La Sal Mountain range in the background helps.

Among a host of natural formations, Thor’s hammer is likely the most iconic image of Bryce Canyon NP. Belying the name, Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon. It has no river running through it carving the formations over millions of years (like the Grand Canyon or Zion Canyon). The hoodoos in the park stand on cliff sides and have been formed over millions of years by water seeping into the rock with the resulting ice expansions causing disruptions in the rock.

The Milky Way was in the wrong place this night ( I guess it’s never really in the wrong place….it just wasn’t where I wanted it to be to place it in this image!). This tree shape is perfect for this shot…..it leans into the frame and has the right balance of branches.

The legend is that early cowboys would run wild mustangs into a natural narrow ledge on a cliff overlooking a 2,000 ft. drop and close a fence on the ledge when they gathered the horses. At one point, apparently, the horses were not released and subsequently died of thirst….hence the name.

Unlike Bryce Canyon or the Grand Canyon, visitors to Zion enter the park at the bottom of the famous canyon carved over the millennia by the Virgin River. Many of the most famous hikes in the park rise dramatically as you wind your way up to the top of the 2,500 ft. cliffs. The Angels Landing trail leads an intrepid hiker to the small mesa (Angels Landing) which is only accessible by climbing across steep ledges with rock cliffs on one side and a 2,000 ft. fall off on the immediate other side. Helpfully, park rangers have installed chains on the cliff side to hang on to.

Sometimes serendipity happens and you have to be ready to see it and capture it. By itself this tree isn’t particularly scenic or dramatic, but the afternoon the sun lit up the tree and it was possible to isolate the tree away from the background and make a very nice image.

Broken Arch is in Arches NP and gets its name from the split in the top of the arch which looks like it’s about to break.

Another serendipitous moment…..seeing these and imagining the image is part of the photographers skill. This spiky tree in the shadows shows off well against the red Cliffs and blue sky in the background.

Another of the iconic images in Arches NP. You have to be a little adventurous to get this image because the correct photographic spot is up on a small ledge with an access trail that requires quite a bit of agility to navigate. But of course….no problem for me!!

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor (26 November 1878 – 21 June 1932) was an American cyclist who won the world 1 mile (1.6 km) track cycling championship in 1899 after setting numerous world records and overcoming racial discrimination. Taylor was the first African-American cyclist to achieve the level of world champion and only the second black man to win a world championship in any sport — after Canadian boxer George Dixon. (Wikipedia)

In the 1890s Worcester, Massachusetts was the capital of a very robust bicycling sport and industry in the United States. The city hosted six bicycle manufacturers and thirty bicycle shops with most of the bicycle shops fielding a racing team which competed in the many regional and national racing competitions.

In addition to winning the world one mile championship, Taylor won many other titles and at one point held the world record for seven different racing events. After his death in 1932, Taylor and his feats faded into history and he was largely forgotten in Worcester and in the nation’s bicycling community.

During the last 30 years the bicycling community has rediscovered its iconic champion. A few years ago Worcester placed a sculpture of the rider in front of the city’s public library and the major cycling association in the city holds an annual competition called the “Major Taylor George Street Hill climb“.

Held on George Street which is reputed to be the steepest street in Massachusetts and also the street on which Taylor trained during his race preparations, race contestants run time trails up the 500 yard street.

The event draws professional and amateur riders from all over the east coast and although the race only lasts a little over twenty seconds for the best riders, the stress on their quads lasts for days!

The race includes brackets by age and several multi-rider categories. This is a Father/Son team…..notice the look on the son’s face!

This is Major Taylor’s great-grandson who lives in the Boston area and participates in the event each year.

These guys have some serious hair!

About 20% of the riders fail to make it up the hill. It’s only 500 yards but gravity often wins!

She’s competing in the 60-70 age bracket and finished 2nd. Awesome!

The competition is held in August each year and in 2015 it was cancelled because of rain. These photographs are from a race held several years ago.

Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button on the right side of the page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

During my recent January visit to Death Valley I observed to a local that very few visitors were in the park and that I found this surprising given the moderate winter temperatures (daytime in the 60’s and 70’s). I ventured that summer would be a terrible time to visit because of the well-known record high heat indexes. “Au Contraire” said the local….summer is the park’s high season and the valley is filled with foreign tourists that the park’s rangers recognize as “Heat Tourists”. These are people who want to experience some of the highest temperatures on earth for themselves, even though they can’t actually spend a great deal of time outside in the furnace-like conditions.

This was my first visit to Death Valley National Park and it kindled fond memories of watching “Death Valley Days” in black & white on our first family television in the 1950s. It was sponsored by Twenty Mule Team Borax which was a popular clothes detergent at the time (Can you imagine Millennials buying a cleaning product made of borax today?). Those “Mad Men” advertising folks were right on the money…….huge amounts of borax were mined in Death Valley in the early and mid twentieth century and in the early days, the borax was indeed carried out of the mines to processing centers in wagons pulled by teams of twenty mules.

Furnace Creek is the locale where earth’s highest recorded temperature occurred in 1913….134 degrees. Average day time highs in the summer are 116 degrees.

I expected that most of the valley floor would be covered with sand dunes but the dunes cover only a small portion of the valley.

Much of the valley floor is composed of these salt flats which are formed when water from the surrounding mountains carry sediments down onto the valley floor where the water eventually evaporates and leaves the minerals (much of it salt) sitting on valley surface

In addition to Death Valley, Death Valley National Park encompasses a wonderful variety of different landscapes and environments including other smaller valleys and various mountain ranges. These Joshua trees are in the park but about 10 miles from Death Valley itself.

I shot this on one of the scenic mountain peaks surrounding Death Valley just as the sun was rising. If you look carefully, you can see the various layers of mountains and color.

One of the enduring lessons in photography is during those magic moments when the light is special….look around! As I was taking the “Layers” photograph above, the dunes behind me were being lit up by the sunrise. This kind of scene lasts less than five minutes because the rising sun gradually fills in the shadows and the drama disappears. Lucky I turned around to see what was happening behind me!

To get a sense of scale…notice the figure walking on top of the dunes in the upper left portion of the image.
Thank you for reading my latest blog entry. If you thought it was worthy of your time and you hadn’t already done so, please take the opportunity to subscribe by clicking the “Follow” button on the right side of the page. You will receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Also, you can share this blog entry on your Facebook page by clicking the share button below or you can email it to folks by clicking on the “Email” button.

Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

Here’s a little quiz for you geography geeks….where is the highest and lowest point in the continental United States? Well amazingly, they’re within 100 miles of each other in eastern California. Mt. Whitney is the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states and of course, Death Valley is the lowest spot in the U.S.

In January, along with six other folks, I joined a photography workshop in California led by the superlative professional photographer Marc Adamus. In the course of a week we covered several thousand miles of California splendor as Marc continually put us in position to capture iconic images.

_DSC2413 - Version 2 — The Alabama Hills

The Alabama Hills are a legendary set of rock formations in Lone Pine, California and were the location of virtually every western movie (and many TV shows) made in the 1950s and 1960s. A local road called “Movie Road” meanders though the hills and the sites of some of the most renown western movies. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Lorne Greene, Tom Mix, and Roy Rogers were regular visitors to Lone Pine (could this town have a better name?). Their photos and hundreds of others are hanging in many of the town’s restaurants.

_DSC1736 — Eastern Sierras View with the Owens River

The Owens River flows through the Owens valley in eastern California and was the target of the fierce California water wars in the early 1900s. Facing an increasing population and decreasing water availability, the city of Los Angeles bought up land in the Owens Valley and constructed an aqueduct to carry the water out of the Owens Valley into Los Angeles. By 1920 the city had completely drained Owens Lake and valley farmers were irate that their agriculture businesses were in danger of collapsing. This led to years of years of resistance and accompanying violence (farmers blew up the aqueduct repeatedly). Aspects of the conflict were the basis of the Jack Nicholson film Chinatown

The area around Bishop California is prime photographic territory. Galen Rowell, one of photography’s luminary figures was based in Bishop and although he passed away years ago in a plane crash, his Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop is a must see for everybody. His work is an inspiration to all aspiring landscape photographers.

This day there were intermittent storms and cloudy conditions that obscured the mountains but occasionally there would be a luminous shaft of light that would strike the landscape. My goal was to find something photogenic and wait for that shaft of light to make some magic.
I found this curved fence line leading to this lone tree with blue toned clouds obscuring the mountains in the background.

These stalagmite structures called “Tufas” sprout up in heavily carbonated Mono Lake as a result of underground springs rich in calcium rising in the lake and interacting with the carbonated water with the resulting calcium carbonate material incrementally forming these spires (Wow! heavy science info!). The water level has receded significantly in the past 50 years leaving many of the largest Tufas on the shoreline where photographers photograph them incessantly.

Mammoth Lakes resort is on the northern portion of the Sierra Range and like much of California in the past few years is experiencing severe drought conditions with the natural snow pack on the mountain being much smaller than normal. One third of California’s water originates from this snowpack.

Because of the hilly terrain and high altitude, the area is a mecca for athletes, particularly long distance runners, who like to train at high altitudes.

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Frank

Shrewsbury, MA

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