mountain

Little House, Not on the Prairie

The view from one of the summits on the Undercliff Trail, as was the shot of the lonesome pine a couple of posts back.

Tilting at Windmills?

Yucca Valley, California

As we continued our dusk drive back to Palm Springs from Black Rock Canyon we passed by windmills again, bluish and haunting in the cool evening light.

Click any image to see them full-sized.

Driving back to Palm Springs from Black Rock Canyon we caught a lovely sunset. I caught these images through the car window on the drive (I wasn’t at the wheel). Click any image to see them all bigger.

More Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree

Click any image to see them all full-sized.

Leaving Joshua Tree

After Cap Rock we piled back into the car and you can see the near foreground motion blur in the first photo again. On the way back to Palm Springs we passed through a wind farm with snowy mountain backgrounds.

Moving Past Joshua Tree

Before we got to a trail to walk around I was snapping shots out the window of the moving car (I wasn’t driving). Shooting at about 1/250th second I managed to mostly freeze motion in the deep background while still motion-blurring in the near foreground. Some images also show some reflections in the car window. For most of these pictures I opened up the shadows in the foreground and dampened the highlights in the sky. The overall effect is slightly painterly.

Those who have followed this blog for any time know that landscape isn’t my thing but the stark beauty of a place like this could almost convert me.

Click any image to see them all larger.

Layers

There are a lot of trails you can hike and we just ventured briefly onto one of them shortly before the light started failing in the late afternoon. I like the smooth layers of the background landscape.

Palm Springs

Mountain Pass

Just back from a week’s vacation in southern California. I’m not sure my touristy snaps are any better, or even different, from anyone else’s but you can look forward, over the next week or so, to my winnowing of hundreds of pictures with you as my audience (if you stay with me…)

Mountain View

Continuing with these Kodachrome slides my father shot in 1964 (see story here), we have 4 mountain views from the trip to Yosemite.

Yosemite National Park

Lonesome Pine?

And now, for the next handful of posts, we return to my father’s Kodachrome slides, mostly from 1964 and the American West (see the original post about these slides here). That summer, while my brother and I remained with our grandparents in Sacramento, my parents and uncle buggered off to San Francisco, Reno and Yosemite National Park.