Tag Archives: full moon

Goblin Valley

Well hello there, long time no posting…

So, it has been a while since I got on here and posted some new work.  Between getting back from Burning Man, packing my whole house in storage, and moving to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, things have been a bit crazed.  Never fear though, I have been working a lot and have some exciting new work to put up over the next few days.  Aloyse came down for a week to visit during the full moon, even with the rainy hurricane Jova weather we still managed to get some terrific new images. First things first though, I still have one shoot I did on the way home from Burning Man that I never got around to posting.

One of my favorite places on the planet is this bizarre spot in the middle of the deserts of Utah.  Named Goblin Valley, for its unusual sandstone rock formations, I can truly say this place is one of the world’s most magical and psychedelic locations.  I have been coming to Goblin Valley since I was about sixteen, and my friends would be surprised to see the new pay station, on grounds ranger housing, and full campground.  The cat may be out of the bag.  Fortunately, we were still able to drive right into the park at night and “illegally” run around in the moonlight.

Getting to Goblin Valley was the end of a great adventure. We had had a long few weeks of road tripping across the American west, and when all was said and done we had traveled over 4000 miles.  Accompanied by my great friend Angelo Valenzuela, we had driven from Colorado to Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Black Rock City, now were slowly retracing our steps towards home. As we crossed the desolate strip of highway between Salina and Green River, Utah, I watched the moon traversing the mackerel sky, illuminating the vast desert emptiness.  Slowing heading for the horizon, I was concerned we would not get there in time to use the moon’s natural light.  As we pulled in to the parking lot, the moon was low, but on an angle that was reminiscent of the “golden hour” just before sunset.

The night was cold, and I was afraid that shooting naked might be miserable, but once disrobed, I adapted quickly and felt comfortable enough.  I climbed up on to the rocks and went through the usual static poses.  Then something happened.  I became a four-legged alien monster creature. Always looking for new directions and growth, this seems like a very fun interesting avenue for exploration.

Goblin Valley is a truly bizarre and amazing place.  Wherever you look there are rocks and towers that resemble everything from falaces to faces.  In the second image, if you look at the rock, you can see the profile of a face, leering at me in the dark.  After shooting in the first three locations, the clouds began to move in and the light became obscure, so I pointed the camera directly at the moon.  At this time, Angleo decided to jump in to the photo and we got a wonderful backlit image.

On the way back to the car, the moon set, the clouds really came in and we didn’t have much of a flashlight.  Suddenly, we became wildly disoriented.  Goblins reared out of the darkness, and I was irrationally terrified.  Although Goblin Valley is not large enough to really get lost, that moment of panic was an amazing experience.  After a few frightening moments, we retraced our steps, and were able to find the truck.  The campsite was full, so we parked a few miles away, and fell asleep pretzeled together in the front seat.

Temple of Transition

I am going to acknowledge another less successful attempt in my photography.  At Burning Man this year, the most impressive art piece was certainly the “Temple of Transition.”  In years past, the Temple was this really spooky place you visited, left an offering, and got the hell outta there.  Even though previous temples had been incredibly beautiful, they were certainly not the hub of action that this year’s temple turned out to be.

My first close view of the temple happened from an art car manned by the Piñata’s Revenge Camp.  We cruised around the magnificent structure at sunset as the earth harp was being played for the masses gathered below.  The great sky changed color every few minutes from pinks to purples and finally blues.  It was really something, something sacred and special, and something I wanted to come back and photograph.  I kept putting off shoots for various reasons, eventually choosing the night of The Man burn.

I arrived early and sat around for a while as the sun dropped behind the horizon and it became dark enough to do long exposures.  The problem with sunsets and sunrises is that they happen so quickly and the light changes so fast that you are constantly readjusting your camera settings to keep the same basic exposure.  It is a real pain, and if you are me, you normally go out without a specific game plan, and things don’t always go so well.   I ended up standing with the backlit temple behind me, which was beautiful but left me a dark blackness in which to work.   Without a front light source I was too dark to see, so I tried to light myself with two very bright flashlights and that was pretty much a failure.  The composition is pretty awful as well, as I am standing central and static in front of the temple and not engaging with my surroundings, sort of an alien tourist at the temple image.

I was trying to achieve this “many armed goddess” thing by dragging the light over my arms in different places; it kind of worked, and might be great in the future but not here.  By the time I started to explore, the light was gone and we were going to be late for The Man burn.  We abandoned the shoot, and I came away from the burn without any new images.  Disappointing in retrospect, but sometimes that is just the way of things. These are the results: nothing special, but as this blog is not only about success but the learning process I feel the need to post what I captured.  (No worries though, the next shoot kicks ass!)  Click on the images for a larger view.


The Suspicious August Full Moon

So, I guess is deserve a spanking.  I have had three photo shoots since the last time I posted, but no blogging.  Sometimes life (Burning Man) gets in the way, but I am back and I will try to share some insights on each shoot.

The “Make Mistakes” crew held the August full moon party, up Left Hand Canyon, just above Boulder, CO.  The party was about an hour and a half drive from my house in Denver and turned out to be quite the debacle of a night.  I arrived to a dark disorienting scene of tents, people, bonfires, and loud house music scattered though a shadowy aspen grove.  Winding through the whole area was a small, shallow stream.  I had been really sick all week and was finally starting to feel better, so I thought going out for a few hours would be harmless.

I rolled my camera bag, the quarter mile from my car, down the pavement to the entrance and stashed it under a tree.  My initial explorations led me down a well-worn footpath that followed the edge of the stream away from the party.  Moonlight was filtering through the Aspens and pooling on the forest floor in a way that made my eyes jump and have a hard time adjusting to the darkness.  I felt dizzy and light headed.  Soon, I had wandered far enough to no longer hear the music, and was mostly alone except for the occasional explorative partier like myself.  The area was strangely un-deserted and had some ax murderer hunting cabins and a 60’s geodesic dome house, complete with barking dog.  I felt all the hairs on my neck stand on end as I passed.

Eventually, I heard the sound of a small waterfall, and knew I had found the place for which I was looking.  Earlier that week, I had seen the proof sheet of new work my collaborator Aloyse Blair had just created in the Adirondacks.  She was naked in a waterfall, and had done some long exposure stuff with her pinhole camera.  I returned to the party, retrieved my equipment, and quickly found myself laying naked in a freezing mountain stream on a cool summer night.  The spot was shaded from the moon so I had to use some alternative light sources.   The flashlights I had kept flickering and slowly fading, so it was hard to get an accurate light reading.  Some of the images were ruined because the light completely went out during the shot.  After a few tries, I decided to put an orange filter on one of the lights just to add softness to the image.

Once I was thoroughly freezing, and could not take the cold any longer, I dressed in green and headed off to do some pure moon light shots.  I found a small meadow further up and created the forest nymph series.  These images were pretty much exactly what I know how to do, so they were easy to create once I decided how I wanted them to look.

After I finished shooting, I felt clear and fresh.  All of the disorientation had vanished, and I was light and focused.  I found some friends and went to dance.  Soon I was hot enough to take off my jacket and boogie down.  A few minutes later I looked over to see that my jacket had vanished.  My car keys were in the pocket.  I spent the rest of the night futilely searching in the dark for a black jacket.  I was flashing everyone who walked by, hoping someone had accidentally borrowed my nice North Face.  My night of a few hours ended with the sunrise.  As it grew light, I sat down in a fancy camping chair at the entrance to scope out the patrons as they left, hoping for a glimpse of my coat.  After a little while, I started to fidget with stuff in the built in cup holders.  I looked down and there were my car keys and my glasses.  Only in Boulder can you go to a full moon party and get your jacket stolen, but the thief is kind enough to leave you your keys and glasses behind.  Needless to say, I got sick again.

Valdovino, Spain or Surfing with the Seekers

Back In Madrid, I think I could live here.  This is such a sweet city.  I have been out on the Celtic coast of Galicia for the past week, surfing with my old friend Marilyn Poon at the Seeker Surf Camp.  It felt so good to be in the water again (even if we did have to wear full wetsuits).  Getting into Madrid was such a temperature shock today.  Galicia is pretty cold and windy for the most part, and today it was really a gloomy drizzly Irish day.  By contrast, Madrid is hot, I mean really hot, I think it was around 35c today.  This temperature thing really played into how few images I made while I was at the coast, not to mention I was totally exhausted after surfing all day.  There was also the daylight factor, as Galicia really does not get dark in the summer until 11:30 at night.  By that time, we were eating dinner and falling into bed, dead to the world.

I was feeling pretty lousy about not making any images, so last night I grabbed Marilyn, just at twilight and went out to the beach right in front of the house.  This big sandy beach is in the tiny town of Valdovino, and although that is what most people call this beach, its official name is Praia de Frouxeira.  The tides were swinging really high and low, and we just happened to be out there during low tide, so we were able to get some really nice images with the reflections in the tide pools on the sand.  Not to mention that we were able to get really close to the tiny island of Percebelleira.  Known for this strange edible barnacle, the Percebes, or “pinky finger.”  I missed out on trying this delicacy, but maybe when we are back up north in the Basque country, I will run across a few.

It felt good to be on the beach, and it was actually the warmest night of all.  For which I was very thankful.  I think we got some really nice images, and I am happy with the outcome.  I even reverted back to what I have now deemed the “ghost dances.”  I have had some resistance to these images, but I am really drawn to them.  I like getting out there, dancing and moving, it feels so natural and yet ritualistic.  They are not nearly as static as some of my images, which have a different kind of rooted strength.

Tomorrow my sister comes, and I have no idea if I will be making many more images on this trip.  We shall see.  (P.S. If you don’t already know, just click on the images to get a full sized view)

Second night at the farm


After a rough early morning, the work we did last night was far more successful.  First we shot at dusk out in the field, while the light was falling, and it seemed like we just did more of the same.  I was staring to worry.  There are not too many successful images from that shoot and the storytelling aspects are really not there.  Not to mention that when I looked at the photos this morning I saw that we had irreparably bad exposures.  When shooting this type of image you have to push your iso a bit and then you risk a serious degradation of the images when you try to fix them up in post.  The blacks block up and there really isn’t much information there.  It’s a tough balance between iso and f-stop, either you get blocky blacks or you loose depth of field and focus.

We started by playing on a large grassy earthen mound on the edge of the field, women in white lined up on top.  I was having issues with my remote properly triggering my timer, so while the light was good we really were not able to get the best images.  Once I finally gave up and hand triggered the timer we had basically lost our light.  We tried a few dancing poses in the field, but the sky was still too bright and we could not seem to coordinate our movements.  It looked really stiff and uninspired, again with bad exposures.  I was beginning to worry, that we were really not going to get anything out of this trip.

Finally, after a few mishaps, we acquired two kerosene lanterns and were able to use those as our light source.  This was the inspiration we needed.  We headed out to the field and were able to shoot three different scenes.  The first is a goddess dance around a fire, the second is a bringing of the light, and the third takes place at the edge of the forest, a mysterious encounter.  I am quite happy with this work.  I only wish we had more nights to work out here.

Old Green Farm

Last night Aloyse Blair and I headed out to the forest on her fathers beautiful farm in New Jersey.  Sunrise was at 5:30am, so we had a 4am wake up call and were out in the forest by 4:20.  We had scoped out the forest the day before and found a few sights that we thought would make good locations. Finding them in the dark was actually easier than we thought, avoiding the poison ivy as we went.

We ran into a few problems right off.  First, I need to get an actual tripod for this work, using my Gorilla Pod just does not give me the flexibility I need to get the shots I want.  Some of our locations really didn’t look very good without the elevation a tripod would have provided.  Second, there is currently no moon and the forest was so devoid of ambient light that it was almost impossible to get anything done with out using alternate light sources.  Tonight we are going to take some old kerosene lanterns out into the forest with us, which should provide an interesting light source and potential creative aspect to the images.  Third, as usual, I really need to figure out the best ways to deal with focus issues, between focusing in the dark and being able to stop down the camera.  I feel some of these shots might have been quite successful if they had been in focus.  As the sun came up we were eventually able to use the dawn light, but it felt rushed, and to be honest, a bit uninspired. Aloyse and I have been doing this type of work for years now and it is easy to fall back on what we know.  I am hoping over the next few weeks we will be able to really push things to the next level.

Given the absolute darkness, I felt very rusty out there and unsure of what I wanted to accomplish.  I am working on exploring the aspects of location and self, but I am still having a tough time deciding what this means.  I feel pretty confident in my ability to create strong images technically, but establishing solid content is proving to be more difficult.  I need to spend more time on the ‘who, what, where, why, when,’ aspect of this project.  Part of the beauty of these images lies in the spontaneity, but I also really need to get out there and be able to direct the scenes.  Thankfully, Aloyse has a great natural feel for this type of performance work and we were able to get something accomplished before the sun rose.

After all was said and done these were the strongest images from last night.   I personally feel the last image works best, but I include all so that you can compare and see how the project comes along over the next few months.