Sometimes, the best thing you can do it jump in your car and drive. And when can bring an amazing model with you, well thats pretty much like awesome to the 100th power. But where to go? I’m not so much of a plan it all out kind of person. I like just going out and doing it, see what happens. But the desert is a big target to go out and your pretty likely to go out and find nothing. Sometimes nothing is cool, love big empty landscapes! But when you want to see something cool, thats when I narrow the target. Find out how after the jump!
Ok, there actually isn’t a super secret way to go find these places easily. I just thought it sounded cool. So how do I aim when heading out and about? I spend an unhealthy amount of time on google maps with the satelite turned on. Like, seriously, a lot of time. I love maps. They’re just a list of possibilities and I want to go everywhere. But if I happen to find some rough looking imagery of the remnants of a jet, or some awkward look rocks, well thats just fuel to the fire.
I could seriously live in my car for a month driving around and checking out all the deserty goodness just down here in SoCal alone. Maybe next month.
But anywho enough about maps and desert and who’s its. I was able to trick slyly convince Alison to come on my latest desert adventure. Which worked out fantastic for me! Go out in the desert, get a little dirty, get poked by a couple cactus, I live for it! Problem is, I’ll most the time end up somewhere awesome with no one pretty enough to shoot, except me and I’m stuck on the other side of the camera. So were off! first to a cool little spot pretty remote with some dry lake beds and a bunch of abandoned buildings. Very cool, I then attempted to take us down a road, that turned into something very much not a road. Mostly just a sand patch. Good times people! Also, cars don’t like sand, for future reference.
Next stop was to hunt down this killer location. Well it would have been killer. Would have been the king of all locations found in the desert. I found it on google maps. It was an old closed down solar power plant. Like the kind you see in movies, (That one scene from Gattica!) mirrors everywhere. Desert scenery. Oh man, just thinking about it makes me drool slightly. But after a bit of research I found it had been demolished a year or 2 ago. It was such an emotional trip, I had to go see for myself. And yep, it’s gone. Totalled. There is another one out there, but it’s still in use, so I hardly think I could go roaming around without someone having something to say to me.
And then the dunes. I love dunes. I love them a lot. And this was the first time I had really gotten to see those dunes in everyones head that define what a dune is. Yah, michigan has some dunes. I saw one, but it was covered grass. Lack lustre to say the least. There are some up in central Cali that I need to scope yet, and theres some way down south that appear to be over run with dune buggies. Not that I blame the buggies, if I had one I’d be cruising it out there hard every day I could.
So I found these, pretty close to an old town called Kelso. Like the last city to ever get TV. They had to wait for satelite, because no one was going to run a cable line out there. It’s remote, man. Like why would anyone have a town there? Used to be a mining town, but thats all gone and now it has a visitor center, but that was about the only real building there.
Beyond just exploring, photographically speaking, it was fricken awesome. I had borrowed a mirror from a couple friends of mine. Just a simple 1 foot by 3 foot wall mirror. (5.99 at target) and that was going to be light. Plugging in flashes is just so inconvenient in the desert, and my battery is pretty much a POS now. And of course, the first place I really stopped to use the mirror, the wind decided it should be smashed in the ground instead. So, whats a photog to do? clamp a piece to a stand and roll with it. In it to win it people.
So yah, enough jibber jabber. Pictures are mo’ better anyway.
