No Boundaries

One of Dozens of Several Hundred Foot Lamoille Canyon Waterfalls

This Post and accompanying gallery addition were intended to include a fairly comprehensive shoot of  two important examples of the sky-island aspect of saline environments: Great Basin National Park and Lamoille Canyon in the Ruby Mountains. Both are isolated high-elevation alpine ecosystems in Central Eastern Nevada.

Things often don’t go as projected, so I can only provide a few good images from what was a largely botched expedition. Fortunately, I can blame almost everything on the weird weather that we’ve been having this year. One of the problems with a winter that extends into June is that, eventually, it has to warm up, and when it does, Summer temperatures ensue without regard for those absent Spring months which have fallen by the wayside, discarded by mother nature. Then months of snow melt are compressed into days or weeks and havoc reigns at elevation.

The general concept of the sky-island is an easy one to explain. Millions of years ago the rocks of the great basin were pulled apart resulting in what is called basin-and-range topography: long north-south oriented high-elevation ridges separated by similarly oriented flat valleys. Thousands of years ago, when everywhere was cool and wet, all of this terrain was covered with either forest or alpine tundra above the forest. As global warming progressed, long before human utilization of fossil fuels, things heated up and dried out. The valleys became desert and the ranges became isolated, forested ecosystems. These small mountainous regions are similar because they share their beginnings in a unified whole and have had a similar environmental history, but all are also somewhat different because they have been isolated from one another, by the intervening desert, for some time.

If you are interested in a more involved and informed explanation please consider “The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin” by Stephen Trimble or “The Desert’s Past: A Natural Prehistory of the Great Basin” by Donald K. Grayson. These are the best books on the subject. The first is more of an extremely-well curated photography exposition and fluid narrative  intended for layman readers while the second is a scientific treatise valuable to those of us willing to put up with large amounts of dry text in order to find answers to the perpetually recurrent question: “I wonder how they figured that out?”

The thing that most people miss when considering the mountains of the great basin is that these are, although limited in aerial extent, serious kick-ass mountains. The elevation of Wheeler Peak at the tippy-top of Great Basin National Park is 13,063 ft — exceeding the tallest peaks in Idaho, Arizona and Montana and just a bit shy of the top spots in Utah, Wyoming and Nevada (in the Sierra Nevada). When you toss in the associated facts that the great-basin high points are often little used and visited, haven’t anything resembling cell-phone service, are largely lacking in navigable roads to the top-parts (or lower-middle-parts even), have lousy trail systems, and are often only accessed by traveling dozens and dozens of miles on dirt, these can range from daunting to downright intimidating.

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Pepper: The Official Photography Project Dog

It has been a miserable spring here in the mountains of Utah. Very similar to the Cubs season this year, the weather has reached 500 (the statistical midpoint between a good year and a bad one) numerous times only to collapse into an abhorrent free-fall requiring a good sense of humor.

This unfortunate spring has been made all the worse by the fact that my children were attending different high schools and their vacations did not coincide. So the photography project should evolve into an almost year-long thing in this instance. Hopefully anyway.  This year, in particular, I’m looking forward to my kids’ release from academia more so than are my kids.

Right now I’m fleshing out my new site with photography and illustration galleries that have been long promised but not delivered. Something more important invariably pops up. I’m giving it a good go now so I should be posting quite a bit of the imagery that has been laying about my desktop for a while.

These should include some studio food and spirits and portrait work (separate projects), Vancouver photography from last November, Saline Environments project work as it crops up, and some more resort HDRI.  That’s all I can think of at the moment, but there are probably more bunches of unprocessed photos in hiding here and there on the occasional hard-drive.

I’ll also be posting the periodic babble regarding the state of the digital world, films and so forth. So I should be hitting the blog a bit more than I have lately over the next month or so.

I’m switching over to a Cannon 7D as my main camera and am tempted to include a bit of video here and there as well.

The Saline Environments Project, thus far, has brought Kate and I out on four short trips. One to Stansbury Island and the Saltair area on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, two to Antelope Island (an island on the southeast side of the lake populated with, ironically, bison) and a very early Spring trip across the Utah West Desert on Route 80 to the Bonneville Salt Flats ( in the vicinity of Wendover Nevada), which were, at the time, covered with water. It is a pleasure doing a project that has so many pieces so close to home.

I vividly remember my first trip to Death Valley National Park about five or six years ago. It was intended as a three-day excursion from a longer trip in Las Vegas. We drove well into the night, camped and, on waking, took a short drive in the middle, lowest elevation parts of the park, only to realize that we had gone so far and had ended up in what is, essentially, the Great Salt Lake (hotter, drier version). We do intend to make it back there as part of this project, but largely as a matter of completeness. It is, after all, the capital of the terrestrial-brine world.

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Things get strange on a Phoenix winter's evening.

I’ve encountered a few of the symptoms lately. I’m sure that, although unique, they are not unique to me. First there was the realization that a magpie had filled my ski boots with dog food. I wasn’t upset. It lives in the backyard of it’s own volition and had made it’s way into the garage every now and then. I’ve taken to calling it Frederick. Magpie’s have an historical Prussian aspect about them. I just threw out the old boots.

Then there was the time I saw the woman in the SUV in the Blockbuster Video parking lot and instantly recognized her as the wife of the American ambassador to China. (I think her husband may make a decent president some day; Just saying).

And, when given a choice between spending the week between Christmas and New Years skiing the finest snow on earth at my own doorstep, or venturing to a slightly chilly Phoenix, I chose Phoenix with only minimal hesitation.

Losing all regard for ski equipment, recognizing the local celebrities, skipping town during one of the best weeks of the year, I may have lived in Park City, Utah for too long.

Phoenix was a lot of fun.  My girls and I ascended all the requisite Phoenix promontories: Camel Back, Squaw Peak, South Mountain; visited the world’s first Windows Store (no big whup); did a little hiking around Tucson; visited the Sonoran Desert Museum and the University of Arizona (both girls want to apply to this one as well); and the whole family unit did the Tempe New Years Eve thing (the Doobie Brothers, absent one significant component).  It was in the low sixties most of the afternoons, so a  bit chilly.  But there was no snow.  And I think I’ve come to think of that as a good thing.

Two items, worthy of note, occurred.  First there was the marching band:

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The Sears Tower: Exemplar of American Ambition

Chicago has never looked better. I’m referring to the city and not my photography. I spent another couple weeks in the city; two days of which were given to wandering around the loop (the city’s lofty core) with a couple of cameras.  I had intended to spend five days photographing but found myself returning to Utah on short notice.  So the diversity of images isn’t as great as I would like. Everything, almost, is wide-angle HDRI of architecture.

I keep finding myself back there. So after another couple of winters I should have a good set of photographs.  The very urban provides a nice balance to the bulk of my nature-based work.

I’m fond of HDRI for a place like Chicago.  The world is crawling with images of the buildings of Chicago and HDRI offers a lot of artistic potential to make things weird when you want to go that way.  Also, the dynamic nature of a big metropolis, where people are of less significance relative to their environment, fits HDRI very well.  Walking people and moving cars on a city street become ghosted and part of the image in a way that suits the ephemeral reality well.

The images were all processed initially with photomatrix and then with camera raw and standard photoshop techniques.  The new photomatrix exposure fusion technique was used extensively (and I really like it).  Several images are blended composite panoramas.

Also I love it when it’s cold.  I think it is the low level of the sun in the sky and clarity of the air, in addition to the hard nature of the subject matter. Chicago photographs best when below freezing.

I’m not sure where the source of Chicago’s current good-looks lies.  The city may simply be all decked out for the Olympics that wasn’t.  Or it could be an artifact of the economy that shouldn’t have been.  Now, the general tone of the people I met, the conversations I overheard, and the chatter over the airwaves was decidedly down.  More so than when I was there this past summer or last winter.

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I’ve been busy and haven’t gotten much posted lately.  I spent a bit of time in Vancouver, doing a little project stuff, meeting some mining  and design folks up there, and touring the University of British Columbia with both of my kids.  The plural “kids” was a surprise.  One appeared, as if by magic, at the Seattle airport where I had been directed to pick up the other.  It was a real pleasure to see the level of excitement on both of their faces while hanging about in a “real” city (their terminology not mine) in a country other than their own.

Another Vancouver surprise was the Canadian celebration of Remembrance day, which in America is called Veteran’s day.  This shouldn’t have been a surprise.  I’ve grown up thinking of Canada as a more sensible nation when it comes to wars, diplomacy and so forth. And so was fascinated to find myself in Vancouver during a holiday week with fighter planes flying in formation overhead while masses of folks saluted the Maple Leaf.  Also, the Canadians don’t push their holidays around in the American pragmatic manner.  So the day fell on a Wednesday.

Only afterward has it occurred to me that, as a member of the British Commonwealth, Canada was probably in for the duration of the First World War.  Hence the importance of the WWI armistice, which is also the provenance of the American Veteran’s day.  Now I understand.  I spent the day shooting the downtown section of the city and should have some of that good stuff posted in the next few days.  I was also baffled by a more or less constant cryptic reference to a woman resembling a horse which emanated from the radio airwaves.  Only during the trailers before the film, “Pirate Radio” which I and my daughters all enjoyed, did this mystery unlock itself.  All had something to do with the British royal family in one century or another.

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