Notes To My Mother

If you Google "Badlands" you will find that there are badlands in a lot of different places because the term badlands refers to a dry terrain with soft sedimentary rock.  For instance, there is a badlands section of Death Valley, California.  These images were taken at Badlands National Park in South Dakota.  The image above is a sunset shot. I don't remember the exact location of this image but I do remember the climb to get it.  It was VERY steep and once to the top it took a few minutes to get used to it and convince myself I was not going to tumble down.  You can see here the cracked sedimentary soil and the layers of sediment deposited over the years. Sunrise at the Doors.  A person can walk into the landscape in this park but it would be very easy to get lost.  On one morning we saw a group that apparently had spent the night.  They were down in a lower area of the park and could be seen from the rim next to the road.  They spent a cons...

For years I had heard people talk about the Badlands of South Dakota and how they wanted to go there, but every time I looked up images the landscape looked so blah I couldn't understand their interest.  Last year I was invited to help a friend scout the badlands for future workshops.  A group of us met up in Wall, South Dakota and explored the area for five days.  I was blown away by the beauty.  The image above was taken in Cedar Pass in the morning. Highway 240 runs the length of the park taking visitors to a plethora of scenic views.  This image was taken at sunset and we found it along the drive.  The geology here is very interesting and raises all kinds of questions about the formation and erosion processes.  I understand the area is eroded one inch per year which is an astoundingly fast rate. The variations in the colors really sets this place off from other places I have been. Reds, yellows, white, grey. and brown.  In mid day light the co...

   Traveling from Sonoma County to the Eastern Sierras I will often stay overnight in Topaz Lake to break up the long drive and give myself a little more time to explore along the way.  Topaz is an unincorporated community located on highway 395 just south of the Carson Valley.  The California-Nevada border goes right through the middle of the lake. It is a quiet, mostly residential area with a couple of motels, a gas station and a casino.  Waking up before sunrise is a real treat as the community has not yet begun to stir and it is such a serene scene.   To the south of town there are a number of side roads to explore that run across the valley to the east, along with a road that runs on the east side of the valley, roughly parallel to 395 for a stretch.  The picture above is a morning shot from the east side of the valley. This is an image of the valley south of Topaz, looking north at sunset.  At about this time of day the coyotes begin ca...

At the end of this month I am returning to one of my favorite places, Arches and Canyon Lands National Parks. The last time I was there I hiked to Delicate Arch and while the walk is about a mile and a half and up hill most of the way, it is well worth the effort. It is difficult to capture how large this arch actually is without something included in the image to help give the viewer a perspective.  In the image above you can see a man and two children posing for a picture at he base of the arch. The North Window In another part of Arches there is a location called The Windows.  There is a North Window and a South Window.  The North window is often photographed in the morning light with a view of Turret Arch through the window.   This image was taken in the very early morning hours. It doesn't include Turret Arch but I love the feel of this image.  For me it conveys a sense of mystery and an expectation of things to come. If you e...

He told me it was the scariest shoot he had ever done. Standing on the edge of the raging ocean, he was constantly worried the surge of the surf was going to pull him into the well. Looking down into it you can pretty well know if you go in you will not be coming out. How thrilling! I looked it up on the web and in reading about it saw more of these kinds of comments about how scary was. O.K., it would be really thrilling! When my friend told me the conditions were expected to be prefect soon and would I like to go, there was no hesitation “Count me in.” It is called Thor’s Well and is located about half way up the Oregon Coast. It is a hole in the rocks that extends out to the ocean so that as a wave comes to shore it enters the hole and surges up through it coming out the top and spilling over on the surrounding rock shelf. It is a continuous emptying, gushing up and out, spilling over, and emptying again. Add to this the surf coming up onto the surrounding shelf as wel...

When I began wanting to know more about photography a friend of mine told me it would be a good practice to look at lots of photographs. So I bought gads of photography magazines, perused the internet, and read books with great images in them. One evening I stumbled upon a picture of Bass Harbor Head and knew it was definitely a place I needed to visit.  Now, I believe that every place in the world is special, it’s just that some places are a little more special. One such place is Bass Harbor Head, a lighthouse on the Coast of Maine, not far from Bar Harbor. I had never been to New England so going to get an image of this lighthouse was doubly exciting. I booked a trip in early October to be there when the trees were in color and made my way to the lighthouse. The first night I was there it was high tide.  In the best of conditions there is not a lot of room for photographers to shoot this location, but at high tide the situation can get pretty dicey. Most photographe...

On the north side of the island of Kauai, just west of Hanalei Bay is a little beach called Lumahai. You can park along the road and walk down a well maintained trail to the beach. The beach is quite different from most of the others in this area as it slopes steeply into the ocean. This affects the wave motions, preventing them from breaking in the usual way. Watching them you can see that the water that is receding back to the sea is moving very fast, pushing against the incoming wave so that just as the wave crests, at the point it would normally break and wash onto the shore, the receding wave stops it and it just kind of collapses and washes onto the shore, without ever breaking. Here is a picture of it, just at the point most waves would break. I was at this beach in the late Spring and the surf was fairly mild. I can imagine in the Winter when the surf is much larger on the north shore that the wave action at this beach would be spectacular.  Because of the st...