“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”  Robert Frost

In my workshops I talk about feeling a place before you photograph it.  In fact we do an exercise.  When we arrive at the location I ask the participants to leave their cameras in the car for at least fifteen minutes and just quietly wander around the area until it speaks to them.  Only then can they get their cameras and try to capture what they are feeling.

This is a wonderful way of slowing down and getting in touch with the essence of a place.

But I must confess it doesn’t always work that way for me.

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My 2003 Prius has had it.  At 230,000 miles it was time to trade it in.  It served me well and we went places I had no business taking it (read “some pretty nasty dirt roads”).  But it wasn’t really a good car for landscape photography.  Nevertheless, it never complained.

So around the end of last year I started thinking about a car that would be great for the kind of photography I do.  I had some basic requirements:

• Cargo space (to carry all my gear including the stuff I need for workshops)
• High clearance (for those nasty dirt roads)
• Good gas mileage (I was addicted to 45 mpg from the Prius)
• 4WD (again, to go those nasty dirt roads)

A survey on the internet turned up several makes and models but the Ford Escape hybrid was at the top of the list.  I visited the dealer and none were to be found in all of Southern California so on January 11th I placed the order.  The decision looked good on paper but would the actual vehicle measure up?

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This year I’ve been honored to be asked to judge the photography competition at the Orange County Fair.  It’s been an amazing experience.  I’m hoping that the experience can be as good for all the people that submitted photographs as it has been for me.  It’s not an easy assignment to sit in judgment of so many fine photographs.  I’m quite sure the other eight judges found the task as difficult as I did.

(Read the first post in this series at

http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/wordpress/journal/orange-county-fair-photography-judging/ )

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It all started with kneeling in the mud.

I was with David Muench, Jerry Dodrill and twelve other eager photographers on a Mountain Light Gallery workshop in May.  We lined up along the bank of the pond just outside Bishop, California and aimed our cameras at magnificent Mt Tom, the dominant peak in the Eastern Sierra crest in this area.

I’d like to take you through the process of making a photograph from the images I captured that morning.

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Good news!  Summer is here!  And we’re thinking “Vacation Time.”  Now, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to figure out that you’re going to take a camera.  So the question becomes, are you going to take your camera that has been sitting around for umpteen  years or use your upcoming vacation as an excuse to buy a new one.  (When it comes to buying camera gear, any excuse will do, at least for some of us.)

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A little over a week ago my new Dell Inspiron 580 arrived at my doorstep.  My wife and daughter finally convinced me to buy a new one.  I think they were getting tired of me storming around the house all grumpy and such when the old on acted up.  Disclaimer:  Computers act up after years of use not because they wear out but because of all the junk you load on them as time goes by that literally clogs the operating system.  So, with a little persuasion from my girls I gave Dell a call.

If your one of those that gets into these things, here’s what I ended up with:

• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i% CPU 760 @ 2.80 GHz (it’s a 64 bit quad)
• Memory: 8 GB
• Internal storage: 1 TB
• Display adapter: ATI Radeon HD 5450 (supports dual monitors – VGA, DVI and HDMI) with 1 GB memory)

So that’s the starting point.  And from here on it gets more interesting – not exactly the Chinese curse interesting but kinda-sorta.  I got a good deal on the Dell but it as it turns out I wasn’t even close to being done spending money.

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Well, the third leg was so exciting and so filled with beautiful locations that its account had to be divided into two parts.  So we pick up after sunrise at Mono Lake and continue on with the wonderful ghost town of Bodie, California.

If you missed the first thee posts here they are.

Eastern Sierra Workshop: Leg 1 – Lone Pine

Eastern Sierra Workshop: Leg 2 – Bishop

Eastern Sierra Workshop: Leg 3 – Lee Vining

Bodie is a fascinating place on several levels.  It is one of the best preserved examples of a boom town, supported in grandeur between 1877 and 1880 by the gold that was extracted from its mines.  Many of the buildings are still standing although considering that at its heyday there were around 2000 buildings that housed a rip roaring population of about 5000 to 7000, the several score of buildings that are left is rather small.

And yet, walking along its streets it’s easy to let your imagination run wild and guess what it might have been like to live there.

This was a wonderful day to visit Bodie.  The parking lot was surprisingly empty except for two big yellow school busses up from Mammoth.  The 4th graders were having a field trip as part of their studies of California history.  And boy, what a field trip that must have been.

I’ve never had so much fun photographing Bodie as on this day.  So I think I’ll just let the  photographs speak from themselves and present them without further comment.

And finally as we retraced our steps back down Cottonwood Canyon a farewell party met us to send us safely on our way.

So that’s it.  Not long after this last photograph was captured I found myself unwinding the week that had just passed as I returned down highway 395 towards home.  As I left Lee Vining and passed through Mammoth, Bishop, Big Pine, Independence and finally Lone Pine wonderful memories came over me like passing through a dreamy fog.  I felt a sense of both gratitude sadness, gratitude that we had been so fortunate to have such wonderful light and sad that it must come to an end.

But my family was waiting for me 300 miles away and I was ready and eager to see them again, share my experiences with them and catch up on what I had missed while I was away.

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With two wonderful and highly successful legs already completed we left Bishop and headed further north.  Our travel day was a big day for photography with a lot of very exciting stops planned.

But before heading out, here are the links to the first two legs in case you missed them.

Eastern Sierra Workshop: Leg 1 – Lone Pine

Eastern Sierra Workshop: Leg 2 – Bishop

For our sunrise shoot I had planned to photograph the snow clad mountains from the Alkali Ponds just north of Lake Crowley.  It was going to be a 45 minute drive and we wanted to arrive at 5:00 so you can do the math.

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Mono Lake, a photo by Ralph Nordstrom on Flickr.

It was exciting to return to Mono Lake this year and see that the water level has actually risen. It’s been down for about five years because of drought conditions in the Sierra Nevada. Now it’s up 6″ and expected to rise another foot during the summer. I’m going to have to get back up here to see that. I’m very excited.

After a windy day the lake calms down and waits for gentle night.

Via Flickr:
Most of the time you don’t get the big explosive sunsets at Mono Lake. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with quite, introspective sunsets like this one.

Over the years I’ve entered photographs into the Orange County Fair photography competition (with some success).  This year I was thinking about the photographs I wanted to enter when I was contacted by the folks at the fair.  They asked if I would be willing to be a judge.

Now, it’s an honor to have your photographs selected and an even greater honor when some of them receive ribbons.  But I think the greatest honor of all is to be invited to judge the competition.  But when I accepted I had no idea how tough it would be.

(For a followup post, please see

http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/wordpress/journal/orange-county-fair-judges-walkthrough/  )

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