Another winter in the rear view mirror. Well not quite yet. I find myself back in Southern Nevada. And, yet again, watching the rising side of another corona virus wave. Park City has already passed the peak of it with the surrounding county achieving the tenth-worst status of all counties in the country just last week. This one is quicker to rise because the responsible variant is much more contagious, and less likely to do personal harm, because the same variant appears to be more like the common cold than have been the more virulent earlier versions. May it pass rapidly and without too much destruction. And maybe, just maybe, may more normal times ensue.
Since my last post I’ve added a series of photographs from the gulf coast of Florida mainly around Grove City and Boca Grande. These can be found in my photography pages as part of florida usa 2. These are from a trip taken in mid-December and reflect a period of relative viral quiescence in the sunshine state, a bit of an interregnum between the two most recent dominant COVID waves.
And what a wonderful trip it was. Because of family reasons we’ve bookended our virus-related aversion to flying with trips to this same part of Florida. How lucky to have chosen that period of time to go rather than during the catastrophic Christmas holiday season which came only a week or so later.
We flew directly on an almost empty plane from a new and teeny airport in Provo Utah to a similar but larger and more established airport in Clearwater Florida. An on-the-water rental house and a chance meeting with the widow of a childhood baseball hero, at the end of our street where folks gathered to watch the sunset, made this a really memorable trip. It also felt as though the pandemic had ended to some extent, which was very nice.
Another new item is a video hacked together from a bunch of clips from a trip to coastal Oregon, between Astoria and the California border, from several years ago. Time flies when you are having fun. This can be found in my video gallery. Also in the photography galleries are a few new local shots from around Southern Nevada and Park City, nothing very exciting.
I’m currently putting together Lightroom albums of food photography and still-life photography, some old but mainly new, which should appear as part the photography galleries in the not-too-distant future.
Also trips that generally fall along the western Arizona and California desert portions of the old Route 66 are planned that should result in some more Arizona and California photos and one or more videos: Seligman, Jerome, Kingman and Oatman Arizona, the Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park. It should be fun with a little camping thrown into the mix.
Oatman is a relect Arizona mining town now turned over to tourists and the feral descendants of the donkeys who once worked the mines. Jerome is one of two “hippy” towns in Arizona, or so says Facebook. I’m fond of the other, Bisbee, so I will give this one a try. And the parks of the California desert have not been my favorites. I’ve only visited them briefly. Although they are worth another try given both proximity and the pandemic.
Finally, While continuing to work with After Effects, I’m back to working with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in preparing some vintage style illustration. That should end up on the site at some point. It is time intensive but glorious fun. Oh, and Adobe Spark, mentioned in my last post, is now Adobe CC Express and is going to be available as part of the Creative Cloud. And in the not too distant future a cancelled trip to Maui should be back on the horizon.