Cultural Mirages: Route 66 and the Mojave Desert

Jan 26-28, 2007

On this year's installment of this classic workshop, Dave and Ken Rockwell led us in explorations of some of the favorite destinations from previous adventures. A couple of lucky suprises added incredible photo-ops to Saturday's explorations. I was hired on as the instructor for night photography, and for astrophotography. Our base of operations this year was the Holiday Inn Express, which turned out to have some nice advantages for presenting the day's haul of images, as well as endless amounts of free snacks for late night Photoshop'ing. First stop on Friday was Tom's Welding on the old Hwy 58. He's been very generous these past few years, this time letting 30 photographers the run of his expanse of Route 66 era metallica. All shots were hand-held with the Minolta Dimage A1 camera.

Tom

An abstract of aluminum blocks

Caressing duct hoses

Tom at work.

Next stop was the train station and sunset

Layers of color

Alien invasion in progress

Night photography projects near our motel...

Day 2: The journey to Amboy

Day 3: Dead trucks and dark storms