Death Valley 2011

We have made many trips to Death Valley and each time I find it a fascinating place to explore and photograph. I like going back in my files and find new images to work on that I previous overlooked. Certainly the process in Photoshop has improved greatly since I made this image. This is another sleepless night for me so I decided to work in my modern day darkroom (photoshop) to help clear my mind of events of the previous day. I enjoy the quiet time in the middle of the night. The quietness takes me back to my darkroom days where I spent thousands of hours standing alone in the dark to make my images. The work of the darkroom process is a difficult one but renders the most satisfaction for me personally when doing photographing printing. This image was made shortly after sunrise out on the Dunes. Death Valley is a special place to visit and you might consider making the trip yourself one day

Time

Time is a thing we take for granted and it is always slipping away, but in our youth we can squander it freely without thought. When I visit an old structure such as this fallen down church I get a sense of time and it's passing. At one time it was the pride and joy of a small community but now it is abandon and the people are gone. I look out over the empty land and there is not a home or a town for miles. I am curious how this church was build in this far off place. The advent of the railroads bought people and productive farms to remote areas of the Midwest Plains in the early 1900's. Small towns grew up quickly with the influx of people, but eventually most died out when the trains stopped running in the last couple of decades. So as I sit in these quiet places and listen to the squeaky door hinge as the wind blown against the door, I feel the sprit of the place and have a sense of the people from long ago.