Even after looking twice, I was still a bit anxious spending any time at all in the middle of a highway, preoccupied with my camera. I was fiddling with the depth of field, and after what I thought were decent settings, snapped the picture and headed back to the shoulder. I boosted the contrast on this photo to really make the centerline shout, and I think the high aperture makes the focused part of the asphalt stand out.

I had a day off from work, and I took my car out and started driving east. This was one of the first pictures I took on what ended up to be an all day road trip. I was just east of Borrego Springs, CA when I took this. I was heading off to the Salton Sea (why I went there I'll never know...) and spotted a dirt road off the main highway. I started going down only to be impeded by the loose sand. Any further and I would have spent the day stuck. I enjoy this photo because the reds and oranges of the rusted barbed wire complement the golden expanse of dried weeds and sand. Looking back I would have gotten one of the fence posts more central to the shot to help in framing.

This was a beautiful evening and I very much enjoyed the night I spent trying to achieve these nighttime long exposures. This was one of the most technically challenging shots, as I had to figure out the correct exposure time to both get adaquete light levels as well as a complete taillight streak from the passing cars. It was a very abandoned road, and I think I was out there for around two hours, only getting a chance at a shot like this a few times. After I took this picture and realized it was the one, I rushed back home and got it in post that night. I cranked the hue a tiny bit blue to make the sky colder, as well as warmed up the bottom half of the photo to make the contrast a little more pronounced. I probably didn't get to bed until three that morning.

This photo was taken on a lazy evening in the early summer. I was hanging out with my friend Johnny on the Santa Ysabel Reservation and we were looking for something to do. I don't remember why we thought taking the car deep into the reservation, up onto the hills, would provide anymore excitement than we were currently experiencing, but we did it anyways. It was dusk, and light was becoming short in supply. We stopped to get out and I pulled out my camera to take this shot. I found the proportioning of the hills made quite the sight to look at. When I got the photo on my computer, I was disappointed though, as the lack of light took any color or definition out of the photo. I had auto-bracketed this particular shot, so I saw how HDR would look. It didn't improve it much, but I still had a wonderfully framed shot, so I decided to slap on a black and white filter to see if it would improve it any. I think it did. The definition reappeared with the black and white atop the HDR composition, and those two post-processing techniques made this photo into one of my favorites. 

This picture was one of the many that I completely stumbled upon. While my memory of the day isn't what is used to be, I believe I was driving down this road for a task no more consequential than picking up something at the store, or something of similar import. I had my camera with me for no other reason than it was my new toy, and I took it everywhere. As one takes a left out of the mile long dirt road from my old house onto the highway, there is a large hill that takes a good half mile of driving to reach the summit. Being on that side of the hill, the sun had already set and everything was blanketed in a dull shade of lavender-blue. Nothing to pull the camera out for... But when I reached the apex of that hill, this sight hit me hard. Beautiful it was, something that I had seen around these parts only but a few times. Of course, I darted to the shoulder and started taking pictures, experimenting with shutter speed and ISO. The challenge I faced here was to get it bright enough for the cloud detail and sun streaks to still be evident, yet not so bright as to hide the subtle and rich colors that soaked through the entire picture. I feel like I got it just right, or as right as I knew how to.