I'm still here

hi guys,<p>

 

I know I haven't been here in a LONG time. I don't even remember the last time I posted a topic. I kind of got

out of photography for a while, partly because I just ran out of ideas. But also I've been dealing with a lot of

things in my personal life. (The past year has really been an emotional roller coaster.) I took a few pictures

and shot a couple of rolls of film here and there, but never anything that I thought was worthy of posting.

Well, in the past couple of months or so I've started to get back into taking pictures and I've even started

working in the darkroom again. I just wanted to show a few pictures that I've taken recently. I have a lot more

to post too, and hopefully I'll be a regular here again. <p>

 

I went up to the Mormon Rocks recently and took some photos with my Minolta SRT-101, and Tri-X film. The Mormon

Rocks are a formation of cliffs in the Cajon Pass in southern California. They have holes eroded into them, and

I always thought it looked like giant Swiss cheese! <p>

 

<img src="http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f86/gatewaycityca/mormonrockssmall.jpg"> <p>

 

I took a geography class in college a while back, and my teacher explained that the holes were formed because of

a chemical reaction with water which caused certain minerals to erode faster than the surrounding rock. So it

left holes and pits. They said the cliffs used to be part of a mountain range at one time, which makes sense

because you can tell by looking at the layers of rock that the cliffs extended higher and farther at one time.

You can see how it's kind of uplifted. <p>

 

A railroad line passes through this area too. I'm pretty sure it's a BNSF line (Burlington Northern Santa Fe),

but it could be Union Pacific...<p>

 

<img src="http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f86/gatewaycityca/tracksthroughmormonrockssmall.jpg"><p>

 

Also, I recently got a new toy to play with. A friend knew I'm really into vintage cameras, so he gave me an old

box camera he had found in a thrift shop or something a while back. It's a Spartus "Presh Flash" camera. I took

some pictures around my neighborhood to test it, with Kodak Plus-X film. It has some major light leaks, and the

contrast is really low. I would describe the pictures as maybe "dreamy" or "nebulous." But still, it's an

interesting look. I took this picture of an old house that's just down the street from where I live. Here's a

contact print I made from one of the negatives. I just took this about a week ago, but it looks like the picture

is 100 years old! <p>

 

<img src="http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f86/gatewaycityca/spartuscontactprintsmall.jpg"><p>

 

Okay, I've got one more to show ya. I still play around with Polaroid Land cameras. I took this with my

Polaroid Automatic 100, with an orange filter on the lens. It's just a simple snapshot of the tree in my front

yard, but I thought it looked pretty cool! I was hoping to capture the mood of winter. <p>

 

<img src="http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f86/gatewaycityca/February62011small.jpg"><p>

 

That's all for now. I'll have more to post soon.

<p>Welcome back, Chris; I hope things settle down for you in 2011. Great limestone terrain in your Minolta pics; I think I'd be spending some dawns and sunsets in that country! I like the image from the old Spartus, and the Polaroid of the twigs is really stark and dramatic. Please keep posting!</p>

<p>Hey Chris, good to hear from you again!<br>

I can tell the Mormon Rocks are old, most sharp points have eroded with age. Very much unlike younger mountain ranges with jagged peaks etc. I'm feeling slightly sorry for myself that we don't have such rugged landscapes here in the Netherlands (okay maybe in the Limburg Province). I only get to take shots of sand dunes and conifer tree plantations ;)</p>

<p>Like the rail road shot,</p>

<p>Rick</p>

<p>Welcome back! Good pics all around. You were missed.</p>

<p>Welcome back, Chris. Sometimes it's necessary to take a sabattical from photogrpahy. other times you just have to keep firing away. Life can be rough and Polaroid film ain't gettin' any cheaper !<br>

The Mormon Rocks area looks like a swell place to get some thinking done. Please post some more photos if you have them.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Glad, you are OK and back. Keep up with the Polaroids. If you need a new idea, I just converted a Polaroid 95 to 4x5 with work and $60. Give it a try, that will keep your mind of everything else.</p>

<p>Nice to hear from You Chris! I'm glad you're still around! Really liked the polaroid shot "Winter" I remember the first box camera shots I did too were so "nebulous" you'd think they were taken back in the day!</p>

<p>Chris, nice to see you back. </p>

<p>Welcome back. Nice work.<br>

Photography can be very helpful to the psyche, or at least I find so.</p>

<p>Those rocks look a little like the Alabama Hills rocks that used to be in so many Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy movies (N36º W118º). ;)</p>

<p>Welcome back Chris, we have missed you, and hope you will continue to post from now on.<br>

I wanted to write to you again, but did not want to keep "bugging" you.</p>

<p>Hi Chris,</p>

<p>Glad to see you're alive and well. Your photos look great. Photography, and creativity of any kind, is a great stress reliever, soothing to the soul. I find I'm most creative when I'm also the most stressed - though I wish it weren't so. </p>

<p>Related to creativity: I'm currently finishing up a 2-year degree that I began in the mid-1980s, in Engineering. And now each semester, I take one class for fun, to relieve my mind of number-crunching boredom. And all the fun classes so far (geology, color photography, fundamentals of drawing, and acting), have ended up being.... therepeutic. Stress relieving. Good for the soul.</p>

<p>Be well, keep on creating.</p>

Thanks everyone, it's really great to be back here. I'll definitely have some new pictures to post soon. In fact, I just developed a roll of film a couple of days ago and tomorrow I'm planning to order a bunch of stuff from Freestyle Photo Supplies. I'm really anxious to develop some prints in the darkroom and as soon as I do, I'll scan them and post them here. The negatives look good and I think some of the pictures are going to look pretty cool.

 

Unfortunately, I also have a tragic anniversary coming up. On February 19th, it will be 1 year since my friend Tom passed away. It's hard to believe, it doesn't even seem like it was that long ago. I look back exactly one year ago, and I remember when we were still hanging out. He would have been coming to my house practically every day and we would just play on the computer, looking up things on YouTube or playing video games. Sometimes he came with me when I went out to take landscape photos. I'm trying not to think about it too much, but I'd be fooling myself if I said it's not going to be in the back of my mind. The past year has really been an emotional roller coaster ride. I really miss Tom, but thankfully at least I've also made some new friends. And I've also become really close to his family. I've especially gotten really close to his little brother, who thank God survived the accident. In a way, he's kind of like my little brother now. I'm trying to be a good influence on him and teach him new things, even a little bit about photography. But sometimes it seems like he's teaching me things too, how to look at life differently. I guess kind of like how Tom did.

 

Well, I'll be back on here soon. Thanks again for the great welcome back. I'll have some more photos to show ya guys!

<p>Oddly, I'm glad to hear the update on Tom as well. I remember your post, and was haunted by it. I'm glad there's been some healing / closure.</p>

<p><strong>Chris</strong>-<br /> Good to hear from you! Been wondering how you've been doing. I missed your posts about the loss of your friend-I went back and found them. My sympathies to you. I know what it's like-I lost a very close friend there in San Bernardino many years ago. Car rollover on 40th at the Conejo curve. We were also like brothers.<br /> <br /> If you get a chance, check out Devil's Punchbowl, near Valyermo. It is the rest of the same formation, separated by 20-25 miles, courtesy of the San Andreas fault. It's much much bigger and is a great place to hike. It demonstrates that Plate edges are not always distinctly on either side of the fault.<br /> To get there from Mormon Rocks: either continue up the road (138) to Pearblossom Highway and go south from Pearblossom; or continue up 138 just to Hwy. 2, then 2 to Big Pines Rd.; or (I like this way), right when you approach Mormon Rocks, turn left on Lone Pine Canyon Road (IIRC, the canyon is the San Andreas fault trace) and take it to where it runs into Hwy. 2. Check a map for exact details.</p>

<p>Nice shots! Great tonality.</p>

<p>R<strong>ick van Nooij</strong>-<br /> The Mormon Rocks formation is actually quite young geologically. They are sandstone, so they wear readily. They are separated from the Devil's Punchbowl by 20 or so miles, while matching formations elsewhere along the San Andreas have been found hundreds of miles from each other! The Cajon Pass, where they are located, is a very dramatic part of the San Andreas Fault Zone, with two mountain ranges, the San Gabriels and the San Bernardinos, on different tectonic plates, sliding past each other. It's a place with some great visuals: torturously folded rock layers, laterally displaced streambeds, etc. I used to live a few miles from there near the edge of a box canyon, and the geologic folding had caused huge sedimentary rocks in the canyon to be tilted straight up, i.e., perpendicular to the way they originally lay.</p>

<p>great shots</p>

<p>Hey Chris, welcome back! I'd wondered where you were but we all have different things going on that often pull us from our favorite pastimes, so I figured you'd come back when the time was right. Looking forward to seeing lots of pictures!</p>