This is for Me

I love my dad.

He is sick.

I will be taking a photo of him each day I spend with him.

July 12, 2011

(click to view larger)

Bad Wilderness

I found these images sitting on my USB drive and remembered I had intended to write a blog post about the trip, so here we go…

I have seen many spectacular images taken at the Bisti Badlands in Northern New Mexico, which has caused me to want to photograph their myself. After all they are only a 3-4 hour drive away from my front door.

Last June, during my sabbatical I asked my dad to accompany me on an overnight trip to do our own exploring of the badlands. Documentation on the Bisti Wilderness is somewhat scarce, it is fairly remote, and has no established buildings or trails. All the roads leading into the area are dirt roads that go through Indian Reservations. We left town in the early afternoon with plans to arrive a few hours before sun down.

When we pulled into the parking area at the wilderness boundary (the Badlands are a BLM established wilderness area) we the only vehicle in sight. We set out on a short hike and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves among some interesting rock formations.

(click on any image to see it larger)

We headed back to the vehicle after sun dropped below the horizon. I captured one last image before climbing into the Jeep and heading into Farmington for the night. The silence and the stillness in the air was incredibly peaceful and a bit eerie at the same time.



The next morning we woke up early and headed back out into the badlands. I captured only one image I was pleased with that morning; which I posted some time ago over on flickr.

El Malpais Last May...

I've been meaning to post these images for nearly... 8 months now. In the early part of my sabbatical during the summer of 2010 my dad and I took a few day trips to various spots around New Mexico. One of the day trips was to El Malpias National Monument. The national monument contains prehistoric lava flows from several surrounding volcanoes. El Malpais means "bad lands" in Spanish.

This first image is taken from the Sandstone Bluffs. On the left, just past the edge of the bluffs you can see the lava flow several hundred feet below. On the right, on the horizon is Mt. Taylor (named for President Zachary Taylor) which stands at 11,301 ft. in elevation. It has names in at least 9 different languages (Tsoodzil and Kaweshtima are two other names).

This second image shows a close up of one type of lava feature in the Lava Falls area in the McCartys Crater. The lava is primarily basalt and these particular rocks are examples of Xenoliths (I could not find any information on the iridescent colored moss).

I thought the lava looked a lot like the tops of the brownies my mom used to make when we were kids. The lava formations shown here are called pahoehoe (pa-hoy-hoy) which refers to the smoother looking lava. The Lava Falls trail was the only trail we hiked on that day.

I was hoping to make it to some of the lava tubes and caves to do some exploring, but unfortunately we did not. The National Park Service has since closed the lava tubes due to bats developing a fungal disease known as "White-Nose syndrome." They have no plans to re-open the tubes until they determine if the disease was caused naturally or introduced by visitors to the park.

One Year Ago...

My Girlfriend became my Wife, but she is still "The Girlfriend."


I Love You, Erin

Click the Photo for a larger view.
Photos from Dry Heat Photography

A Grand Time

I thought I would end up blogging a bit more during my sabbatical, but turns out I found other distractions.

Sabbatical started off with a road trip to Grand Canyon National Park with The Girlfriend and the Kids. She took a long weekend away from work; we packed up the Jeep and headed west. Due to time constraints and the fact that we had the dogs with us we planned to only visit the South Rim. The Girlfriend had never been to the Grand Canyon before and I had not been since I was a young child.

The first day at the Canyon gave us beautiful conditions for photography; we had scattered clouds that made the skies interesting and provided dappled light on the rock bluffs down in the Canyon.



Visibility that day was higher than normal at about 130 miles. The Grand Canyon has the “privilege” of being in the path of weather patterns which blow pollution from the Los Angeles area up into the canyon. The second day visibility had dropped to less than half of the first day, to about 60 miles.


Standard practice for all our family road trips is for me to setup the tripod and get a family photo (or when you have three dogs, you take 200 in hopes that one shot will have all three looking towards the camera) and this trip was no exception.





As we walked along the path from the South Rim visitor center we encountered several small groups of Japanese visitors. They were fascinated with our dogs! They asked if they could have their pictures taken with the kifd. Mind you they were not asking to take pictures of our dogs, but wanted us to use their camera to take a picture of them posing in a picture with our dogs. Fortunately our dogs do “sit and stay” pretty well.






By the end of the day the dogs (and The Girlfriend) were pretty tired from all the walking and posing.






We eventually made our way back to Mather Point so I could get some pictures at sunset. I was not disappointed.

A lit bit later...




The second day was quite hazy and a bit breezy with a perfectly clear sky, which made for less interesting pictures. We spent the day visiting the view points along Desert View Drive.

That night I decided to take advantage of the clear skies and shoot a star trails photograph while the rest of the family was fast asleep in our Kabin.




Finally it was time to head home. We made a quick stop at Sunset Crater National Monument, unfortunately the dogs weren’t allowed outside of the vehicle so we didn’t spend much time at the Monument.

All in all it was a great start to my time off from work.

Pistol Whipped

I went to the mountains (i.e. the forest) with my father the other day, just to get out and do some exploring. As customary in our family, we brought some guns to do some plinking.




This is a .22 caliber Ruger Mark I pistol. It was bought by my grandfather and is now with my father. This gun has an usually trait. The REAR sight has always needed to be off to one side. I decided to photograph it because my father was talking about sending the gun back to Ruger to be "fixed." I had always loved the odd quirk about this pistol; despite having the off-set rear site it has always been a very accurate, fun gun to shoot.

I picked it up and looked at it and noticed the rear sight was more centered than it had been previously. I asked him about it and he explained he did take it to a local gun-smith, and the gun-smith tried to fix it.

"Arghghgh!"

I could have hit someone right there! I told him not to have the gun fixed. It was an endearing feature that the rear sight needed to be nearly all the way off the gun in order for it to be sighted correctly.

So here are some photos documenting its "half" fixed state. The rear sight actually used to be off-set quite a bit more than it is in these shots.

What To Do?

Lubbock Or Leave It
Originally uploaded by dcumminsusa

One of the best benefits my employer offers is a sabbatical. Every 7 years we get rewarded with 8 weeks of paid vacation on top of our normal vacation.

I am now officially on my sabbatical. Waking up on Friday morning brought back memories of being a kid knowing that you were going to your last day of school before the summer vacation.

I have several things I want to do with my time off and at the same time I want to keep it wide open to do just do whatever strikes my fancy on a particular day.

I'm not sure what I will do today, but I do intend to keep everyone posted (and hopefully invoke some envy :-P ) by updating my blog over the coming days.