Category Archives: Photography

Apple Valley Ranchos

22 photographs (8 x 10 inches) and 1 brochure with a map. This is an album of promotional photographs and a brochure of a “Western-style” townsite and housing development in Apple Valley, San Bernardino County, California. Views of the small town of Apple Valley in the desert; interiors and exteriors of ranch houses; people in western clothing riding horses, dancing, and working with livestock.

NotesTitle devised by cataloger. Photographs are stamped with date “1949” and “Apple Valley Photo Center / Ralph H. Cowles / Box D500 LVSR / Victorville, Ca.” Photographs were in a tooled-leather album cover with title “Apple Valley Ranchos” made by “Deere. Van Nuys, Calif.” The leather cover had mold, and has been treated and sealed. Photographs were removed from deteriorated plastic sleeves and kept in original order. The community of Apple Valley was developed by Newton T. Bass and Bernard (Bud) J. Westlund (not pictured).
SubjectsHousing development.
San Bernardino County (Calif.)
Recreation.
Architecture, domestic.
Form/GenrePhotographs. (aat)
Physical CollectionErnest Marquez Collection

Digital Collection
Photographs, Huntington Digital Library

Neutopia

Ringo floated above the plain
lying
on his back, of course.

sparkling dark stars singing in hum and motion

the pack of coyotes executed their plan
poorly, however,
and in a frenzy, they ate themselves next half-moon

Wide, deep blue ribbons wave lazily in the echoes of evening

these are events sworn to in an Affidavit
in the Land of Null and Nothing.

Carol Highsmith’s Barstow

Barstow, California

Highsmith, a distinguished and richly published American photographer, has donated her work to the Library of Congress since 1992. Starting in 2002, Highsmith provided scans or photographs she shot digitally with new donations to allow rapid online access throughout the world. Her generosity in dedicating the rights to the American people for copyright-free access also makes this Archive a very special visual resource.

Here is her photographer’s eye on Barstow, Ca. — 2012

Wallflowers

The Wallflower Collection

A collection of historic and vintage photographs by a variety of photographers reworked and colorized. Working with these old photos like this has given me reassurance that the things I see, they would have seen in much the same way.

These are the Days

There are those memories of the autumnal winds when seasons turn upside down and the icy drama of the silver winter threads through the hollows between trees stirring last year’s brown leaves into a low ruckus and crackle. Thin and bare sycamore branches, delicate and bony, trace low and lonely moans in their dark choir. Pink sand from the nearby riverbed salted everywhere and anywhere; grit flecked in your hair, in your shoes, in your eyes. These are the days. These were the days. These are the heartfelt and kind memories of these days.

Summit Valley IV

Summit Valley I, Summit Valley II, Summit Valley III

  • Van Dusen Road/ Coxey Truck Trail from Cajon Summit to Holcomb Valley
    Van Dusen Road/ Coxey Truck Trail from Cajon Summit to Holcomb Valley
  • Summit Valley
    He (Hoffman) saw nothing between Summit Valley in the river he considered a likely site. In fact, Hoffman condemned the entire route as unsuited for travel.
  • Traces of old trails and graded roads near the Cajon summit.
  • The direct route over the summit and down the pass eliminates the steep climb and descent over the San Bernardino Mountains.
  • Cottonwood tree
    Cottonwood tree at the massacre site in Summit Valley
  • Chard Walker watching trains pass from the terrace beside the Decanso in 1954. From his book, “Railroading in the Pass”
  • Highway 138 entering Horse Thief Canyon - Summit Valley
    Highway 138 entering Horse Thief Canyon (Summit Valley)
  • Summit
    Summit
  • Las Flores Ranch
    Las Flores Ranch
  • Summit Valley with San Gabriel Mountains
  • Old trail
    Old road over the divide near the summit of the Cajon.
  • Looking west up Antelope Valley Wash toward Cajon Summit
  • Summit Valley Road
    Summit Valley Road
  • Summit Valley, Las Flores Ranch
    Summit Valley
  • Las Flores Ranch
  • West Fork Mojave River Bluffs #2 – Summit Valley
  • Sunrise, Juniper Woodland – Summit Valley
  • Summit Valley from Highway 173 Viewpoint
  • Cajon Summit
  • Northbpund I-15 Freeway Cajon Pass at Summit,
    Cajon Pass at Summit,

Vasquez Rocks – Photos

View of the principal formation from the west.
The typical, iconic side is on the east capturing the morning sun.
The entire look of the place may change in just a few footsteps.
This place is a maze with countless places to stay out of sight. If I were a movie director I would want to film here. If I were a robber I believe I should find this a good place to hideout.
Ample dining facilities–especially if you do not mind sharing–a table, or your sandwich.

Veristic Surrealism

Veristic surrealism; an abstraction of a reality created through free thought.

~ Now playing at the El Rancho . . .

Questions to ask yourself;
Do you like it?
Why do you like it?
What does it represent to you?

Veristic – positive, life, moving forward.

And if you do not like it; it does not exist.

Broken Leg

Somewhat behind the scenes . . . Death Valley

A gentleman named Bill had a hankering to wander about the desert. He had been told the way to really see the desert was to walk through it. He liked the idea and drove as far as Death Valley to start a good distance from all humanity and all things civilized. Here he met a Shoshone Indian Chief who traded him a fine burro for a fine, fairly new car. Off he went for a wonderful, if not occasionally harrowing adventure. Through Nevada into a corner of Utah back into Arizona and down the north rim of the Grand Canyon and back up the south rim to the village and then back to the desert in California. Well over a year had passed when he returned to his wife who was waiting for him in the little town of Baker in the middle of the Mojave. All was well upon his return and his adventures were becoming known far and wide. Bill had become known as ‘Burro’ Bill. One evening there was a knock at the door. Bill was surprised to see his friend, the Shoshone chief. The chief wanted his burro back. ‘Burro’ Bill said the burro was his now. They had been through so much together and he could not bear to part with the beast. The chief explained that a day or two after Bill and the burro departed the car had a flat tire and broke a wheel therefore was not drivable, therefore the deal was no good. The burro was still operable while the car that sat in Death Valley was not.

ref: review
Burro Bill and Me, Ramblings in the American Desert
Author: Edna Calkins Price

End of the River

Sink of the Mojave River, Afton Canyon, Soda Lake

Rather than growing wider and emptying into the sea the Mojave River becomes smaller and smaller finding its way in the sand between the cobbles and rocks curling into crescent -shaped dark meanders and swales transitioning to dry sand and finally, collections of same sized stones.

Mojave River https://digital-desert.com/mojave-river/

One Fine Day

A beautifully alive day in the Mojave Desert.

If you want to see the desert pick a fine day and go to the desert. It will be cloudless, hot, and asleep and pretty much as you expect it.

If you want to be in the desert while it is awake and alive and changing its own character–go when there is drama in the skies and in the wind. Go when its army of clouds cast unshaped shadows of camouflage on its colored hills. Go when rain is pouring down from the heavens in patches and flooding the landscapes and carving the canyons and washes. Go when the wind is blowing sand that scars its cliffs and uprooting the Joshua trees that have become old and weak. Go while the desert is growing, reshaping, and in a dubious struggle with itself. Go then.

Red Rock Canyon

West Fork – Mojave River

Just Sayin’

I suppose, if there is any hard and clear boundary to the Mojave Desert that this is where it is. Over time, the Mojave River has cut away the bluff in Summit Valley, east of the Cajon Pass, as the Mojave Desert moves with the rest of the Mojave Block as it separates from the San Bernardino mountain range.

https://digital-desert.com/mojave-river/

Mono Lake

from: Roughing It, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sail-less sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.

Mono Lake

Mono Lake

The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen’s hands. While we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the week’s washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing out. If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. We had a valuable dog. He had raw places on him. He had more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies. But it was bad judgment. In his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the fire.

Mono Lake canoe

The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he struck out for the shore with considerable interest. He yelped and barked and howled as he went—and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him—for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise. He ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in the most extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before. He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet. This was about nine years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day.
…

also see;

Mono Lake

Mono Lake, at an elevation of 6,382 feet has held water for over 760,000 years. Of volcanic origins, Mono Lake covers an area of …

Pictorialism

Pictorialism, an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.

The Pictorialist perspective was born in the late 1860s and held sway through the first decade of the 20th century. It approached the camera as a tool that, like the paintbrush and chisel, could be used to make an artistic statement. Thus photographs could have aesthetic value and be linked to the world of art expression.

Encyclopædia Britannica

Quick Study

I shot these three photos as a study in light on the same subject during different times of day.

Morning

Morning

Noon

Noon

Late afternoon

Late afternoon

Zigzag

Interesting how a zigzag of light against a shadow will catch your eye while you look away from the low sun. Anticipation, is paramount; the shadows roll over the mountain canyons and ridges quickly. Observe it then. Blank everything else out and don’t look away. What you will see will never be the same again. Don’t miss your moment!

photo of Mojave yucca at sunset, Apple Valley, CA.

A zigzag of light

Furnace Creek Sunrise

Sometimes you can get caught in an imperfect sunrise.  Sunrise shots don’t always work out.  Sometimes you just have to get out of it what you can–even if it’s just understanding you’ve lived to see another sunrise.

599-furnace-creek-sunrise-j7381