There are times when one (read, “I”) goes out photographing, arrives at a location, and an image just screams out to be made.  The location, weather, play of light and time of day of those moments come together and it seems like all one has to do is point the camera, make sure the image is properly focused, that the exposure is correct, and that your batteries are charged.  Once you press the shutter, you know you have an incredible image.  

For whatever reason, neither Ann nor I slept particularly well that night.  Still, we managed to get up when the alarm went off at 4 am.  Face it, it wasn’t anything a pot of fresh coffee wouldn’t fix.  So we made breakfast, packed up and drove the mile or so down the road to park at the closed logging road for the walk into our meadow destination.

Come on now, you really didn’t think that Ann and I could live 20 miles from the totality of a solar eclipse and not figure out a way to experience it did you?  And us being the way we are (see how I very not-so-subtly made this a collective trait), us figuring out a good way to experience the eclipse turned into an adventure.

I’ve always used the term vertical and horizontal to describe the orientation of my framing of photographic images.  However, many use the terms portrait and landscape orientation, to the point where I’ve actually read someone argue that if a photograph of a landscape is not oriented horizontally, it’s not a landscape photograph.  Face it, even Microsoft Word refers to the orientation of a page as either “Portrait” or “Landscape.”  So there’s got to be something to it, doesn’t there?

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Charlie Waite, a landscape photographer from Great Britain, studying his images and thinking through what he has to say about them.   Regarding one image, of a stark white tree and an old barn in front of a forest backdrop, he says: 

“I was drawn by the peeling paint, the windows, and the milky roof.  The red paint contains a whiteness that echoes the silvery silhouette of the tree.  Remember what it was that first drew you to an image, and retain a sense of that in the final photograph.”

After three days of 100+ degree temperatures and with Beast all fixed up, Ann and I were more than ready to start making our way home.  

While in Fresno, we’d had several conversations with people about places to go and routes to take home, so we had a few options.

Our July trip was a maintenance trip to Fresno to get Beast’s mud room sprayed with waterproof liner (an item that didn’t get completed before our April pick-up date) and to repair a couple of things that worked loose during the May expedition.  Everything was covered under warranty while Ann and I spent 3 days telecommuting from a hotel room while Fresno experienced 100+ degree days.  But as is our way, we made the trip down there and back another adventure.

It didn’t take us very long after we got back from our May expedition to be mentally raring to get out again.  It took us a couple of good weekends to clean Beast  after 3 weeks on the road, but by the end of that second weekend we were starting to go stir crazy.  So where to?  The Painted Hills naturally.

This was the first of what we hope will become the normal pattern with Beast - a long weekend to somewhere nearby that gives us an opportunity to focus on photography and generally get away from it all.  That’s why we bought the Sportsmobile, so we could easily get up and go.