While visiting San Diego between Christmas and New Year’s, to my surprise touring on the waterfront among aircraft carriers and other ships, stands a statue representation of the famous sailor kissing woman photo. It stands 25 feet tall and attracts quite a crowd, even on a weekday morning. Recently the man in the photo/statue passed away. The woman passed away in 2016. One’s feelings about the action captured in the photo, and the statue itself, can no doubt vary widely. One thing for sure though, it delights a lot of people visiting San Diego’s downtown waterfront.
Right on time to the weather forecast, snow began falling at 5pm on a Friday. By midnight it was a frozen landscape like I have never seen in Albuquerque, New Mexico before. There was not just snow cover, it was as if the trees and ground themselves had become snow leaving only dark ponds to contrast with all that white. I went out with my tripod to make these long exposure (5, 15, 30 second exposures) in black & white around my own apartment complex grounds.
Over the course of seven days staying in the Ocean Beach community in San Diego, California I went to visit the Ocean Beach Pier several times. It looked and felt different each time. I was there for a brilliant sunset. I was there as a storm approached. I was there when the pier was nearly completely empty, and when it was filled with people. I met a pelican. I walked it, and I rode a Bird (electric scooter) down it. I listened to the stories the ocean whispered as it passed under and around the pier.
My rural land photography work often takes me out into the desert were very few signs of life exist. Sometimes I scare a jack rabbit from behind a bush. Sometimes black beetles back their way over the sand. Birds may soar overhead looking aimlessly for food or greener perches. Plants seem to be in abundance in some areas of the desert, like the one pictured above, but how much life is there? What does desert life mean? Is the desert as alive as the jungle?
Slab City. It was a mysterious place floating in my mind for decades, ever since seeing Easy Rider. In my memory the movie showed Slab City as a place in California you can just setup and live, on empty slabs of concrete out in the desert. In preparing to go to Slab City recently, I read up some about it. It was supposedly still a lawless place where the police did not go, and were not wanted. I was actually concerned about safety issues trying to just drive through Slab City. I expected to be met with very unwelcome looks, as an outsider. Slab City, I thought, is not a place for casual visitors.
If are a subscriber to my business Facebook Page, then you see my regular Facebook Live videos from the many rural land real estate shoots I am on in remote northwest Rio Rancho and the unique views that area offers. Through the eye of my telephoto lens, you can see nearly all of Albuquerque and Rio Rancho sprawled out at the feet of the Sandia Mountains.
It was a long day at this point when I was driving up a twisting and rising mountain road from Timberon, New Mexico back up to Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Earlier that morning I had made the 3.5 drive from Albuquerque to Cloudcroft. Checked in to the same B&B I stayed at last time I was in Cloudcroft (the excellent Crofting Inn). Made the hour drive down to TImberon and then spent 2.5 hours outside making photographs and flying my drone over a rural land real estate property.
