Burning Man & The Great Ticket Shortage of 2012

Today, the Burning Man Organization will announce its new policies regarding tickets to this year’s event. Growth, permit concerns and an aging ticket system has taken its toll and has caused, what many burners see as a huge disaster. Many of the amazing and mind-blowing art and projects that makes Burning Man what it is each year are threatened, because theme camps and project teams have received only about 25% of the tickets they need to complete their projects.

There’s a lot of debate out there right now and a lot of people who are devastated. I get it. I’ve only been once and there hasn’t been a day since I got back that I haven’t thought about its effect on me on how I can re-arrange my life to fit Black Rock City into it. Should Burning Man move to a private location? Should we use non-transferable tickets? Many questions remain unanswered. I’m not sure what will or should happen, but I do know that we can all find ourselves back there again. I have hope that this will create a better Black Rock City and that we can all be together again.

It is speculated that later today, they will announce a plan to place the tickets in the hands of those who have the know-how, resources and experience to make Burning Man amazing. I don’t consider myself on of those people, but I still hold hope that I’ll make it back. There’s still Burning Man’s STEP program, which is supposed to help facilitate a secure exchange of tickets at face value amongst burners. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Hopefully, today will be another step towards a better event and you can bet your ass there’s thousands of people holding their breath right now.

Last year, the planets finally aligned and I was privileged enough to make it to the playa. For years, I made excuses or had my head in other places, so I never made the trip. When I finally did, it was everything I hoped. It changed me forever.

Thank you citizens of Black Rock City, from DPW all the way to the Sparkle Ponies. Whatever happens today,  I hope to see you at home and good luck with tickets!

 

I will never forget the time I spent in the desert with 50,000 of my closest friends sharing ideas, living with wild abandon and being astounded by each other. It shook me up and poured me over some ice.

Every day since, I’ve been trying to hold on to what I learned there. I left some of my prejudice and judgement out there on the playa, gasping for air and I thought I didn’t bring any. I don’t know how long its going to last, but I see things differently. It’s easier to be in the moment and its easier to open up to people. Those were two things I thought I was good at. I know now that I do not know how to give.

I can hardly describe the feelings I had over the course of that week and I won’t even try to. I will say that my heart and my brain are different now and I want to stay this way. I want to hold on to that Its-A-Wonderful-Life feeling that I have right now and I want to carve in stone the truce I’ve made with everyone in the world, good or bad. Its easy to write it all off as some giant desert art party, but it is a very special place on the border between personal freedom and the law where people treat each other with more respect and empathy than I’ve ever seen. People are more real, less diluted.

They say it’s the 4th largest city in Nevada (for a week). They say its the most educated city in the world. I’ve been to a thousand cities and it is impossible to compare Black Rock City to any of them. It’s more a feeling than a place.

Black Rock City is now my favorite city. I had too much fun to take the time and really take careful photos, a mistake I won’t repeat next year. I was perfectly content at the time to just be in such a wonderful place with such amazingly talented and creative people. I was told not to shoot at all, but thats just crazy talk.

I normally shoot digital, but I decided just before we left to shoot film and I wasn’t even really prepared, I just grabbed the stuff I had lying around. I did however acquire an instant camera that I fell in love with.

Now, I’m find myself shopping for toyhaulers, golf carts and scissor-lifts, planning my future around how I’m going to make it back and how I can apply what I learned there to my everyday life. I miss the playa more and more everyday, but one of the lessons of Burning Man is live in the moment, so I’m off to be with my lovely wife. Hopefully, I’ll see you there next year.

Rise

I threw a few lapses together for a juried exhibition at the Lancaster Museum of Art Gallery. They said they never get video entries.

Efrain the Shepherd and the California Poppies

On the way to scout a location for a couple’s shoot, I drove by an amazing field of poppies. Where I live, that isn’t uncommon, but this one had a herd of about a thousand sheep not too far away complete with shepherd. I couldn’t resist the impulse to stop and record this amazing sight. California’s State Flower flourishes nowhere else in the world like it does here in Lancaster, Ca. For most of the year, the Mojave desert here is barren, brown and desolate. When Spring rolls around, sometimes it looks like the rolling green hills of Ireland only laden with caution orange. I stopped to speak to the man who was tending his sheep very near one of the thickest patches of orange poppy quilt I had ever seen.

It turns out, even though I mistakenly asked him what his number was, his name is Efrain. He tends about 5,000 sheep in the Antelope Valley each spring and took the time to hang out with me for a while and try to bridge a language barrier. He seemed to like the photos I was taking as they played back on my camera’s screen. I’m not sure, but I think he asked me for prints of the images and I tried to communicate with him that I would bring him a few in the next day or two.

His dog, Frederique, was tending the flock during our meet and for a moment gave me a heart attack when I noticed the sheep spilled out on to the road blocking a car for a moment. I felt sure I had caused it all and it hit me like a ton of bricks that I have a huge responsibility as a photographer to not put people in danger. Sometimes people see cameras and they automatically get distracted and play to the camera and lose their surroundings. I need to mind my location, I need to keep my wits about me; lens choice, ISO, aperture and shutter speed be damned.

All in all it was a good encounter and I feel like I made a friend. As I left to scout the location, I thought how noble it is to carry out such a simple life in Los Angeles County, where many live a life of decadence and waste. I thought about how good I have it and how this guy’s job was too rough for me.  I thought about my promise to return and I looked forward to meeting Efrain and Frederique again.

All images taken with Canon 7D and 50mm1.4, fill flash with Canon 580 EXII and Lightsphere Collaspsible.

He was probably my best subject. This may be my best work all year just due to him.

The Salton Sea and Joshua Tree National Park

If you like to see a slideshow of these images, please click here.

In southern California, we don’t have to stop doing outdoor stuff just because of winter. While it’s pretty cold in the high desert where I live, all it takes is a short drive to reach a climate more to suitable to adventure. I spent a weekend where desert regions meet and the climate seems like summer in winter.

The Salton Sea is an experiment in management gone wrong. Orginially created by the Colorado River, it has been filling and drying up for centuries. All the salt and minerals from the surronding hills are carried into the lake and remain there when the water evaporates. The changes in chemisty kill fish in huge numbers in giant “fish die-offs,” which leave countless fish carcasses washed up along the beach. The area supports over 400 species of birds with this life cycle and harbors 30% of the U.S. Pelican population.

In contrast to the abundant life, is a number of abandoned business ventures, homes and infrastructure. Dotting the shore are buildings, docks, cranes and homes that have been left to the advancing layers of salt.  Graceful three foot tall birds stand on top of  one leg, on top of  little fish faces, on the scaly beach. Every object on the shore for long enough takes on salty tumors that cling to the skin. Lift your head and again, you see a million birds in the distance, an amazing meeting between living and dying.

Anthony Bourdain came here for the patty melt. John Waters narrated a documentary about the Salton Sea’s forgotten America vibe. This place definitely has its own appeal. Hard to be on the shore of this giant salt lake and not think about the big stuff. like time and mortality.

Not to far away near Palm Springs is my new favorite sanctuary from the cold weather, Joshua Tree National Park. There are more miles of hiking trail than you can shake a stick at, the park has numerous campgrounds and the weather was fantastic in late January. The landscape is amazing, covered in enormous boulder piles that punctuate the desert for miles. The rock mountains make for perfect camp sites, great hiking and attracts climbers from everywhere.

From Keys View, you can see Twenynine Palms, Palm Springs, the Salton Sea and on to Mexico on a clear day. The size and scope of this place is fantastic to see laid out in front of you. Like many of the great National Parks, you could spend a lifetime here and never know this place. Though I left a little over a week ago as I write this, I want to go back. What a vast place.

At night, Kangaroo Rats were shooting through the camp like kamakzes with bad aim. It didn’t take long to realize that this is yet another animal that survives off of our trash and crumbs. Usually this leads to overweight, balding mammals with little or no health insurance.

The Salton Sea at sunset

Towsley Canyon & Route 66

I’ve decided to merge two posts here. One is about a trip down Route 66, the other about a San Gabirel Mountain hike. It was an adventurous weekend that reminded me how fun and exciting being a phtographer can be. You don’t even need a camera really, all you  need is a sense of curiousity and adventure. You’ve heard me wax poetic about being an observer before, but this is meant to be a wake up call.

Get off your ass and live a fun life. Find that interesting thing in your town that you never did. Do you know how many New Yorkers haven’t been to the Statue of Liberty? I don’t either but it’s a lot. Did you ever get that downer feeling when you return home after a long vacation? You’re returning to work, to the same streets you’ve become numb to and the thought of returning home becomes a drag. This is all mental. This is all in your head.

Having had enough, my hiking buddies and I decided during a trip home from the Sierras that we weren’t gonna put up with it anymore. We bought a book on our little Mojave desert city and became tourists in our own town. The trick is to not let your surroundings get by you. Its too easy for a callus to form; too easy to get used to the smell of your job that eventually you just don’t smell it anymore. Its way too easy to be underwhelmed by the ordinary.

The ordinary is amazing. If it isn’t, you’re not looking hard enough. You don’t have to lower your standards, you just have to see better. Take a walk. Go to a museum. Open your eyes wider and drink a milkshake. Make love on the kitchen counter this time. Offend someone and don’t be sorry about it. You can start by commenting below.

Visit Emer Long’s Blog about Bottle Trees here. Or on YouTube.

Hiking Saddleback Butte

~4 miles, 1000 feet, easy

A friend and I hit up a local hill for some views and elevated heart rate. The Station Fire put us out of business for a while; it closed down many of the roads heading into the Angeles National Forest, our favorite stomping grounds. Not to mention we can hardly afford to drive elsewhere and don’t get much time to do so anyhow. So we headed to the mis-named Saddleback Butte, a hill at best, that resembles a small rocky mountain ridge and is not and looks nothing like a butte.

The semantics meant nothing of course when we finally put feet to trail. This very easy 3.2 mile climb to the summit is hardly a hike at all, more like a stroll, but there’s enough elevation gain in it to get you panting if you hit it hard enough and the views are lofty, if only of the high desert (For the record, National Geographic’s TOPO software calls it 1.97 miles one way, or almost 4 miles round trip, 1000ft gain). There might not be any cascading waterfalls or towering granite cliffs, but it’ll do just fine for me.

On the way, we passed a sheriff giving a fruit stand a hard time. I can’t really decide where I come down on this argument, and I know theres an amount of “just doing one’s job” happening here, but you hate to see any kind of home-spun family money making venture having a hard time these days. We passed an old rusted out hulk of a car that has been bleaching in the sun along with all the other couches, shotgun shells, etc that people leave to elements. The Aztecs sacrificed in a sacred place to  a God, it seems desert dwellers sacrifice just on the outskirts of town and offer the gods simply discarded and unfashionable items.

We began the trail from the South parking lot, but you can add perhaps a mile starting from the North end. It is a simple path heading due west straight up the hill. Whoever built this trail possibly had never heard of switchbacks. The trail is sandy and loose on dry days but rain will make itmore cohesive. It can feel like the beach as you walk through what amounts to a gallery of the life cycle of the Joshua Tree, not the amazing album, but the amazing plant.

The trail gets more rocky the closer you get to the “butte,” allowing for a more steady foot plant as you ascend the hill. You pass some great faulted outcrops with signs of ancient volcanism before you’re greeted with panoramic views of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Tehachapi range and the distant frosted white Sierra Nevada. In Trails of the Angeles, John Robinson says that you can see Mt. Whitney from Pleasant View Ridge atop the San Gabriel’s high country and I’ve been looking for it ever since. I’m still not sure, but we saw the best candidate so far from Saddleback Butte. I’m anxious to actually take a lensatic compass and map up there to verify.

It seems like you can’t go wrong being above the desert at sunset.  The wind pushed you around like a sail at the summit, but there’s a lovely summit plateau that you could spend hours exploring where the conditions are nice. I know the term “golden hour” is well deserved for this magic time, but I think it goes beyond photography. There’s definitely something rewarding about watching the Earth turn whether you take photos or video or just sit with your #1 squeeze and take it all in in with Sangiovese and Oreos. Sometimes simply observing and witnessing the world is enough for me. You don’t have to look very hard or very far to find something amazing.

All images taken with Canon 7D + EF28-135mm IS, many of these are HDR’s.