I took a load of junk to the dump this morning and got drive by’s on the way home. The second photo is seagulls foraging through the trash after a bulldozer mixed it up. I couldn’t get close enough to get really clear shots of the seagulls, but they really are seagulls in the high desert, not just trash blowing around.
Sunset via drive-by.
When we left early in the morning there was a mist that gave the trees a ghostly look. As we headed out to Paradise Hills, the mist turned into a thick fog, which is quite rare for the Albuquerque area. When we got to Paradise Hills, a couple hundred feet above the Rio Grande Valley, the sun was making its first appearance above the fog blanketed the valley below.
After photographing the sunrise filtering through the dust and mist the other morning, I was inspired to accidentally create a work of coffee art on edge of the counter.
We got our first snow of 2014. Even in color, the snow on the black bamboo makes a B&W photo. My B&W panorama of the Sandias taken through the windshield while driving on Alameda is “not even”, and the last photo is looking west at the volcanos from Lomas and I-25.
On our way to rent a pressure sprayer to prepare the slab in the catio for resurfacing, we got distracted by misty mountains and shaggy dogs, and ended up not getting the pressure sprayer. Such is life and art in New Mexico.
Since I couldn’t very well fit 12 foot long sheets of corrugated roofing and other building supplies in my Mazda RX-8 (second photo), I used The Home Depot’s rental truck to bring home construction material for my “catio” re-roofing project. The truck is a big Ford Super Duty that only costs $20 for the first 75 minutes.
“Ghetto scans” of 4X5 photos I took of a couple of churches and a graveyard on New Year’s day. Between the scanning technique, and the paper texture that gets picked up by the scanner (I place a piece of paper on top of negatives to help distribute the light more evenly), “ghetto scanned” 4X5 negatives end up looking like really old photos.
I went out to photograph an old wood mill in the north valley, and as I got to the top of a rail spur there was a dog gnawing on an old carcass. He was so involved at first that he didn’t notice me. After a few shots, he heard the shutter in my camera and looked up. He was standing his ground and then started coming sideways towards me half snarling and licking his chops. I didn’t push my luck by trying to cross the dog’s path to get down where I could get better shots of the buildings. I got a few shots of the mill from standing on the rail spur and then a shot toward the mountains as I walked back to the car. I presume the dog went back to gnawing the carcass.
We took a walk on the river at sunset on New Year’s day and saw the first pink on the Sandias for 2014. The geese were flying, but the cranes were settling in for the night.
Off Center & Not Even 