Semi-Unknown

I found this plant growing by the side of the road in J Tree and I couldn't figure out what it might be... now I think it may be Eriogonum inflatum ... the fruit didn't seem quite right for an Eriogonum, but everything else fits.

Autumn in the Sacramento Mountains

Mostly pictures of aspens (Populus tremuloides, of course) turning yellow

View of White Sands from the mountains

White Sands

First, a few caveats and apologies. I seem to have had a lot of crud on my lens when I took these pictures... I wasn't patient enough to entirely clean up the photos. Sorry. Also, I edited the photos on my laptop with the stupid adjustable and shiny monitor, so what looks okay to me may be an artifact of the very specific angle at which it was tilted. And it was rainy and windy so I couldn't change lenses or filters or even take a lot of pictures without risking my precious little machine.

I do have a few more photos from this trip that I may post eventually. The problem with White Sands is that it is really difficult to take pictures creatively... very little to work with. Also, it is hard to focus both the camera and one's own eyes in the face of so little contrast. Still, I think I got a few interesting shots.

On the way, US 70. Should have cleaned the mirror.

I think this grass is Sporobolus airoides, the alkali sacaton

Sometimes a shrub (in this case, a sumac) gets buried in the sand.
It sends up a lot of stems to the surface and the stems put out roots.
When the sand ebbs, the root structure holds the sand together
in this weird island of vegetation

Wet sand at the top of a dune

These are the shelters in a picnic area. I couldn't resist a picture of these
wacky structures that look like they're straight out of The Jetsons

Maybe the last for awhile

I don't know when I'll have access to a decent monitor again, so these spring pics may be it for quite some time. (Maybe I'll start experimenting with monochrome.)

The hills looked like some deity had dumped a bunch of
fluorescent chalk on them. The yellow flowers are goldfields (Lasthenia)
the orange are fiddlenecks (Amsinckia) and the white in the foreground
is mostly popcorn flower (Plagiobothrys)

Soda Lake

Suncup (Camissonia)

One year later...

Not exactly the same spot, but close

Carrizo Plain II

Temblor Range

another

Caliente Range from the Carrizo Plain

one

Remnants of an unknown mallow

The great wide open

Near US 101 exit 252

mystery fruit

Photo taken at Saguaro National Park. Probably a species of Thysanocarpus.

Indians Fire

This is definitely one of those "documentation" posts. These are cruddy for the most part.

The so-called Indians Fire started around noon on 8 June. When I came into work on 9 June, the smoke was nasty, but it cleared by the afternoon and was clear until around 1500h on 10 June (Tues) when the words were uttered "Something really bad just happened."

Tuesday, 10 June ~1500h
This plume of smoke was not there 15 minutes
before the photo was taken

Wednesday, 11 June ~0800h
Still going strong. Smoke was able to reach high enough
altitude that it was undetectable by the nose

Wednesday, 11 June ~1300h
Plume of smoke still trailing across the sky... looks pretty nifty here.
(Burned area in these photos is from a control burn weeks before)

Wednesday, 11 June ~1600h
Fire getting closer to where I spend my days. Smoke
finally can be smelled. Flames can be seen (2nd photo)

At this point, I realized that my lens was majorly fucked up and quit taking pictures.

For info on this fire, here is the InciWeb site.

from 2005...

A photo catalog program that I recently downloaded makes it so much simpler to fix certain exposure problems. I am tickled. This photo was taken in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in April, 2005.

Trailer park tree

It looks much more sinister in monochrome...

not another text post

Too bad, suckers.

Just an observation: I've been viewing my blog on various monitors; my laptop, a CRT, and the flat-screen monitor and I'm just amazed (well, maybe horrified) at how different it looks on each one. To set the record straight: my photos are best viewed using a CRT monitor because that is what I use when I edit. (I feel too poor at the moment to afford a flat-screen monitor, so I just use the one at work.) My pictures look like shit on my laptop monitor, which is why I'm using the CRT in the first place. Not that I'm asking any of my few faithful (read: blood-related) viewers to downgrade to a big, heavy CRT, just putting a disclaimer out there: my photos may actually look better than what you can see. In other words, if you think I suck at photography, I'm letting you know that I may not suck as much as you might think.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program...

more from the spring wildflower backlog

Spring in (where else?) Lockwood

Owl's clover and calicoflower. The blue part isn't water,
it is really Downingia cuspidata growing in a vernal pool that has already dried

Midweek bonus photo

Two surprises about these guys: they can cover ground pretty fast and when you look closely at them, they are fuckin filthy.

Carrizo Plain I

After a winter with a decent amount of rain, it is definitely worth a springtime visit to the Carrizo. I have a lot more pictures from my few hours here. Hopefully I'll get them edited soon

Soda Lake

Shell Creek

This place was just lousy with photographers... a couple dozen at the very least. Unfortunately, this is the place where my lens started really going on the fritz... and I didn't figure out what was going on until later that day, so I didn't get nearly as many good shots as I wish I had. I'll just have to come back another spring.

Excuses, excuses

I know I've been a flake about this lately, but I have some pretty good reasons: my computer died and my favorite camera lens is barely working... and it has taken some time to get the new computer up to speed (I hate the bastard). Oh, and I've been hemorrhaging money on my car, too. (Never fear, it's nothing unexpected or drastic. Expensive, though).

With one thing and another, I'm just not feeling like spending time editing photos. In fact, I haven't even installed photoshop on the new computer yet.

So to all my fans (all three of them) I'll try to get back to this soon. -V

I like bark

Sycamore bark

Plantago ovata

Hames Valley

Lockwood