Somehow I ended the Spring having actually finished completely different accomplishments from those I intended to complete when I last touched this journal back in January. Things came up. I did get started with a little photography and video of the former Route 66 in Arizona and California with a quick trip to Oatman, Arizona. There I found the promised donkeys who are in fact more enjoyable to visit than I had imagined, although the town has a tad more of both a tourist orientation and donkey droppings than expected which should have been logically anticipated. The burros were generally outside of the town except when they were being fed at one of the businesses. The road in from the east, a section of Route 66 left by the wayside when the road was rerouted in the 1940’s, is a very attractive set of curves between Cool Springs and Oatman across a small desert mountain range. An active gold mine is visible just before the town. The donkeys are very common and they are quick to approach any stopped vehicle looking for offerings of small chunks of compressed hay sold at some of the Oatman establishments. We left them disappointed until we got into town having come from the wrong direction and having no hay.
Alas the rest of the planned mission will have to wait until this Summer or more probably this Autumn.
Another planned project, aggregating and putting food photography on my site, is quite far along. The techniques are all worked out. It’s a lot of fun, not to mention tasty, when it involves buying take-out as part of the process, and food styling and imaging can be extremely creative. I’ve managed to pull together a couple of hundred old shots taken both in a studio setting and in restaurants over several years of traveling. Also, inspired by a presentation on using lightroom for food photography from last year’s Adobe Max, I’ve made my way through a few tomes on the process and done my share of perusing Pinterest. Additional backgrounds and props have been purchased. I’ve spent the occasional weekend making new images. Soon I should be posting a thousand or so images both new and old in new location-independent gallery-categories of food photography.
As has been the case for a while, my time in southern Nevada has involved lots of small town strolling. This is mainly because one of my dogs will eat all of my furniture if I don’t walk her multiple miles every day. So there are plenty of new photos of desert town life on sunny Spring days. And our Nevada backyard continues to be an attractor of many species of desert critters, few of which go unphotographed.
We also attended the Las Vegas Preservation Foundation Home + Heritage Weekend. We had done a tour of homes in Boulder City organized by them just before the beginning of the pandemic. This time around, we did three tours.
The first one was of the downtown Las Vegas Neon Museum’s most recent additions including their very interesting “Brilliant” which is an arranged group of older non-functional signs in a relatively small space. A video presentation is coordinated with music and digital projection of lights on the signs. It is very cool. None of my photos were taken during the show but during brief periods when the signs were lit before and after the show. Another night trip is planned to the “boneyard”, the main gallery of the museum, soon. Very soon.
The following day we did a self-driven car tour including viewing the exterior of several dozen houses in neighborhoods near downtown Las Vegas that were entirely new to us. This was both fascinating and heartening. Fascinating in that I had the impression that these mid-century modern Las Vegas neighborhoods close to downtown and the arts district, between downtown and the strip, had fallen on hard times and didn’t really exist any longer. And heartening in that many of the neighborhoods are on the way back up and could soon rival their similar counterparts in Palm Springs.
On the last day we toured the interior of eight houses, some in the neighborhoods that we had discovered the day before and some in even more cool neighborhoods that, also, we hadn’t known existed. Watch out Palm Springs. Vegas is on the rise. Touring and photographing interesting architecture and interior design which also constitutes a lesson in both history and culture is always fun. The driving tour also incorporated an element of NASCAR.
At a minimum the tours have led me to decide that Las Vegas will be an ongoing major location for my new photography, as is now the case with Barcelona, Southern Spain, Paris, Park City and elsewhere in Southern Nevada. I have experienced a sudden realization that there really is some “there” there.
Finally making and animating technical illustrations related to geology and mining has been a category of work for me. I’ve decided to start a page on my site which exemplifies this type of work. I can’t post work done for others in this category. So I’ve decided to put up images that indirectly reflect the character of the work. I had thought it might be fun to layout an entire gold mine of my own imaginings but realized that someone might actually try to invest in it, and that would be a bad thing. So for now it will be a collection of maps, cross-sections, and other styles of that school of technical illustration with D3 and GSAP animating code.
A few photographs from Cool Springs station and the road approaching Oatman are present in arizona usa 11 and 12 in my photography galleries. I took only video in the town of Oatman. New Southern Nevada photography is present in the southern nevada usa galleries. New Las Vegas Preservation Foundation Home + Heritage related photography are located in the las vegas nevada usa 2 and 3 galleries. Four new food photography galleries are planned and should appear at some point before my next journal post. The technical illustration page that will be focused on geologic illustration and animation should appear as just a few examples before I post next and develop slowly from there. Other stuff that has been promised, additional short stories from years ago, magazine clippings of the same era, and scans of large-format 4×4 film photographs of Glacier National Park and the Escalante drainage in southern Utah are still waiting to be found, edited, scanned and so forth, before ultimately ending up on the site. Sorry about that. Some new summertime video of Park City, Utah is bound to happen. A mountain trail is a terrible thing to waste. Oh and also, the twice postponed short trip to Hawaii is in the works again. Soon. Very soon.