Owens Valley Sunflowers

Travel photography is not about F-stops, HDR or the size of camera-sensor pixels. Travel photography is about the experience. My first visit to the Eastern Sierra region was in the summer of 2004 when my friend and I took a three-day camping trip to Mono Lake / Bodie and Bishop. It was quite the trip, as we got the most amazing sunsets I had ever seen and the scenery certainly lived up to expectations. However it’s not the photography that I most remember about this trip. It was the camping experience itself.

On one of the days, we stayed at a campground just outside of Bishop. Soon after pulling in, we went to the trailer where the campground manager lived. Then out comes this curmudgeonly fellow with an eye patch. Ok. Rough life, who knows. So we follow him inside of the trailer to make payment when I immediately notice a large caged bird in the corner which normally wouldn’t look out of place but what caught my eye was that there was nothing below the bird to catch it’s poop so you can probably imagine where it goes from there. Let’s just say that it didn’t look nor smell like the trailer had been cleaned for some time… I had to fight myself from busting out laughing in his face for fear of being disrespectful but that image has long since stuck with me.

The night was even crazier as a large group of campground patrons next to our campsite didn’t seem to know the definition of curfew and kept their stereos and loud talking going until the late hours of the night despite repeated visits from the authorities. Some of the other patrons were ticked off as well but it didn’t deter those people. Since my friend and I had a sunrise shoot planned (the photo above) we made no attempt to keep quiet at the early hours and shined the high beams into a few tents for good measure. Those people had probably just gone to sleep not long before so neither of us felt any sense of guilt about it.

Though the camping experience was less than ideal, it is experiences like this during a trip that add to the experience. If everything were always fine and dandy then it would be a boring planet. If looking back at the trip six years later can bring a smile to my face then it was probably worth suffering through a night of hell for.

See more of my Eastern Sierra pictures.

Milky Way Galaxy in Night Sky Over Chalk Bluffs, Owens Valley, California

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a month since I photographed this but this photo was taken after a crazy day with a couple other photographers in Bishop Creek Canyon and Devils Postpile NM. Basically one of the photographers that I was traveling with hiked onto Rainbow Falls in the early evening from Devils Postpile NM without telling us and nearly got stranded out there in the dark without a jacket, headlamp or water. I’ll elaborate in a future blog post but anyway… on the way back down to Bishop where we were all staying I noticed the Milky Way so I asked the other guys if they wanted to try some night photography. Since it was dark, and with the Chalk Bluffs Road being the area I was most familiar with in the dark, that’s where we went to try shooting the Milky Way. It was a half moon on this night which is probably less than ideal for night photography but heck, we were all there for fun (minus the mosquito bites from the Owens River) trying to learn some new techniques.

After some experimentation and comparing of images, we came to the conclusion that a high ISO, wide open aperture with 20 – 3o sec. exposures was the most effective way to balance quality with getting the stars to show up without blurring too much nor being too faint. I saw Greg Lato’s Milky Way photos on his LCD screen and I think that his use of a super-wide angle lens was more effective in capturing the Milky Way than my 24mm so I’ll be sure to bring my 17-35mm lens the next time I am in a position to see the Milky Way.

See more of my Eastern Sierra pictures.

I had spent the night at Mammoth Lakes where it had rained all night and through the morning. Despite the rain I went to Lake Mary a little bit after “sunrise” to see what the conditions were like. The rain turned to snow and it was so windy that the snow was flying horizontally. I parked at Lake Mary for a few minutes just watching the weather. I didn’t bother getting out of the car much less pull a camera out but it was fun to see from my car though.

Funny how twenty miles to the south I encountered this scene.

See more of my Eastern Sierra pictures.

I am obsessed with shooting pictures of the Owens River. All you hear is the sound of the water flowing by and birds chirping. No other photographers around beating their chests or making absurd requests. It is just you versus the landscape at 6 a.m.

I’ve been searching for a spot like this along the river ever since my first visit to the Eastern Sierra in 2004. I found this spot during the previous morning’s scouting trip while waiting for the Laws Railroad Museum to open. Re-finding the same location in the dark an hour before sunrise isn’t easy though!

The nice thing about shooting in fall is that there are no mosquitoes. On my first trip, my friend Marc and I didn’t know any better and didn’t bring any mosquito repellent… On my previous trip in 2005, there were mosquitoes but I did bring repellent which mostly kept them off me for long enough to make an image that sold for $600 as a double-page textbook spread.

See more of my Eastern Sierra photos.

While acting like a fake cowboy and photographing wild west historic subjects might not appear to be as sexy as photographing “Girls Gone Wild”, it is fun nonetheless. Still life photography is something that I’ve always enjoyed looking at and would like to improve upon.

See more of my Eastern Sierra photos.

After spending the early part of the morning photographing Bishop Creek, I went to the Laws Railroad Museum around 10 a.m. as that was supposed to be the opening time. After ten minutes or so of waiting, the park still hadn’t opened so I thought perhaps it had gone out of business. So I left and drove around some dirt roads outside of Bishop to scout for sunrise locations along the Owens River. I went back to Laws after an hour or so of driving around and it was finally open so I went in.

I had been to the Laws Railroad Museum and Historical Site more than three years ago but wanted to get better coverage of the park, which is California Historic Landmark No. 953. Given all of the cutbacks proposed for our state parks you never know when might be the last opportunity to photograph these places.

The Laws RR Museum is a pretty cool place to spend some time. It is quite a sprawling complex with late 1800’s and early 1900’s wild west buildings as well as a train yard obviously.

See more of my Eastern Sierra photos.