Here's Side Two of the small California story of Highway 58...that part of the road west of Bakersfield and beyond the hustle of '58 over the Tehachapis and on across the Mojave to Barstow. This is the Slow Side of the road that can take you on and on 'till you meet up with its sister road and splash into the sweet Pacific ocean- but first through the prairie lands of Central California cattle ranchers and their roughneck brothers maintaining pump-jacks in places like Mckittrick.
Those rancher's four-strand barbed wire fences nailed to thick-grained railroad ties and green steel stakes so close to this road won't always let us find a place to pull off to give the camera a chance to try to take a little bit of this solitude away for us to revisit in our hands. But even if there is room, take a stand anyway and wait for the few cars to pass and just look right down the middle of a California highway. Absorb this summer coastal moisture in our mind that only teases the dry grasses on the right and left.
Here, the patchwork of moving sunlight dances around playing hide-and-seek with a light meter, but anyway you slice it, the rolling nature of this route promises the virgin traveller of pending dark doom deep in those summer clouds. Only the roadmap can make a one-dimensional guess as to how many more spots we can stop and get a shot like this. I first experienced this scene on Highway 46 many years ago and risked life, limb and car to get that fleeting brass grass and grey asphalt on Kodachrome. Even in this small image on a computer screen, I can see you didn't sacrifice depth of field for exposure; The selection of several hogbacks falling off into somewhere and graphite clouds sweeping on and across the day...makes this a picture I will remember for a long time...thanks for sharing it with us!
California Highway 58
in Landscape
Posted
Here's Side Two of the small California story of Highway 58...that part of the road west of Bakersfield and beyond the hustle of '58 over the Tehachapis and on across the Mojave to Barstow. This is the Slow Side of the road that can take you on and on 'till you meet up with its sister road and splash into the sweet Pacific ocean- but first through the prairie lands of Central California cattle ranchers and their roughneck brothers maintaining pump-jacks in places like Mckittrick.
Those rancher's four-strand barbed wire fences nailed to thick-grained railroad ties and green steel stakes so close to this road won't always let us find a place to pull off to give the camera a chance to try to take a little bit of this solitude away for us to revisit in our hands. But even if there is room, take a stand anyway and wait for the few cars to pass and just look right down the middle of a California highway. Absorb this summer coastal moisture in our mind that only teases the dry grasses on the right and left.
Here, the patchwork of moving sunlight dances around playing hide-and-seek with a light meter, but anyway you slice it, the rolling nature of this route promises the virgin traveller of pending dark doom deep in those summer clouds. Only the roadmap can make a one-dimensional guess as to how many more spots we can stop and get a shot like this. I first experienced this scene on Highway 46 many years ago and risked life, limb and car to get that fleeting brass grass and grey asphalt on Kodachrome. Even in this small image on a computer screen, I can see you didn't sacrifice depth of field for exposure; The selection of several hogbacks falling off into somewhere and graphite clouds sweeping on and across the day...makes this a picture I will remember for a long time...thanks for sharing it with us!