Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Mono Lake Morning Fall 2008

Though photographed a thousand times by a tens of thousands of photographers there are several spots in the natural world that just deserve a bit of your time to appreciate its wonder.

Arrivng early there are several miles of lake coast line that one can walk easily and use as a foreground for either sunrise or sunset. On this day in the fall of 2008, we arrived at a sunrise.

Mono Lake is believed to have formed at least 760,000 years ago, dating back to the Long Valley Eruption. Sediments located below the ash layer hint that Mono Lake could be a remnant of a larger and older lake that once covered a large part of Vevada and Utah making it among the oldest lakes in North America.

Mono Lake is a terminal lake in a watershed fed from melting runoff with no outlet. Dissolved salts in the runoff thus remain in the lake and raise the ph and the salt concentration.

Mono Lake is in a geologically active area at the north end of the Mono-Inyo Crater volcanic chain of the Long Valley caldera. The geological activity is caused by faulting at the base of the Sierra Nevada and is associated with the crustal stretching of the Basin and Range Providence..

Volcanic activity continues in the Mono Lake vicinity: the most recent eruption occurred 350 years ago at Paoho Island in Mono Lake. (Source: Wikipedia 2009)

Trees in their Element

These Tree Amigos are images I have captured over the years that represent the mixture of color, isolation and it merger with their own elements. The first image is Bristlecone pin during sunset that was taken in the Fall of 2008; the second in a meadow in the Smokey Mountains captured in mid-morning during the Fall of 2007; and the third in Monument Valley in the spring of 2005. Each image appeals to different sense when you blend the time of year, time of and the geographical location. The first two images are fairly well know in the native location within national parks, each taken in very different climates, temperatures and time of days. The third image appealed to my sense of balanced forces that sometimes are found in the field; sometimes a symbol of some opposing forces or even a visual contradictions.

As one of my favorite locations, I wanted to add image of Zabrinski’s Point as my first posting. Though at the time of my excursions into the previously thought forbidden location Death Valley both a surprise and basically an enigma to a ‘flatlander’ like me.

Taken at sunrise with Nikon film camera and scanner much later, the lens is pointed west as the sun is coming over my shoulder. Its Easter time during the period I was out there and it was cold. The compression of the lenses and evenness of the light tends to less the creases and folds of the terrain and the richness of the ground.