POTD: Now and Then

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Now and Then
Inyo Mine, California
2024

While in Death Valley for a few days in January, we took the drive up to Inyo Mine. We had been there before, but it was 25+ years ago, so I didn’t remember much of what to expect there. The one vivid memory I did have was of an unusually decorative opening for a stovepipe. So I was interested to see if it was still there after all this time, and it was. It looked pretty much like I remembered it too–an unintentionally artistic detail of vernacular architecture.

To see how this feature had aged since the 90s, when we got home I dug up the photo I had taken of it back in the 90s for comparison. Here it is:

Inyo Mine (old film negative)
circa 1990s

Aside from some changes in coloration, the stovepipe collar itself has changed very little. The cabin wall it is mounted on has lost some parts around the window frame and shows more signs of weathering, but is otherwise little changed as well. Much of the coloring differences between the two images can possibly be attributed to differences in how the film negative and digital captures differed as well as how I processed them on the computer. (In both cases I didn’t mess around with the images too much other than contrast and brightness adjustments and white point adjustment.) All in all, I’d have to say the differences in film vs. digital capture and processing may be almost as significant as the actually weathering changes. And comparing the amount of change in the cabin to the amount of change in my looks over those same many years, I’d have to say the cabin has aged better than I have!

At the time I took the photograph back in the 90s I was also playing around trying my hand at writing haiku, and I wrote one about this image. It’s a bad haiku by my estimation (especially if you insist on sticking to the 5-7-5 format) but it does contain a good pun, if I do say so myself:

Death Valley sun
burns inadvertent art
Inyo Mine

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POTD: Take to the Sky

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Take to the Sky
Death Valley National Park, California
2024

I took this photo for two reasons. One is the way the dramatic way the wind-caused lines in the sand dune sweep up to the cirrus clouds passing in the sky. The other is the pattern of the lines in the sand dunes themselves. While it may look like two dunes, one in the foreground and one sitting some distant behind it, in actuality it is one single sand dune. Although I’m not an expert on sand dune formation, it seemed unusual to me that a single dune would have a compound shape where the slope of the side changes so abruptly resulting in two intersecting patterns of wind lines. But maybe I just don’t get out in dunes enough to know this happens more than I think it does.

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POTD: Patriot’s Dream #84

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Patriot’s Dream #84
Boulder City, Nevada
2024

My series of images about flags (Patriot’s Dream) has been growing gradually for years. The same can be said of my series on books and reading (Lectio). Since I gather and process images from these two series independently of each other in both time and space, I find it quite a coincidence that #84 of both series (today’s and yesterday’s posts) were taken in the same location (within a block of each other) and at about the same time (some few days apart). Even that they appeared on sequential days on POTD was a coincidence because I didn’t realize they were matched until I started working on this post. I’m not trying to assign any mysterious significance to this occurring, other than to note that the gods of chance work in mysterious ways sometimes, or more formally it’s another small data point in support of the infinite monkey theorem.

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POTD: Flying Buttress

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Flying Buttress
Death Valley National Park, California
2024

A very unusual arch or widow. (It’s not always clear to me how the two differ.) It looks like it was from two pillars that leaned towards each other and then fell over at the same time, forming the arch in the process. But that would take a rather remarkable feat of geological timing, so I suppose it’s more likely it was formed as a unified arch first and then started to fall apart due to further weathering of the fissured rock.  On the other hand though, it’s quite a remarkable feat of geological structuring and weather just to get an arch to form in the first place, so who knows.

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