Cedar Pockets

I keep coming back to this area. (Here and Here) It is one of the closest places out of state that I can get to, and my husband works around here, so it is a well-known stomping ground. I love hiking the mountains around this part of northern Arizona, but even more, I love walking around the river. The Virgin River meanders through Cedar Pockets, a BLM campground and recreation area. While it can get crowded, if you are out hiking first thing in the morning or just around sundown, it can seem like you are the only person around. Walking along the river, all signs of civilization are drowned out-- all you can hear are the sounds of water lapping up onto the "beach" and the noise that standing waves make when they fall into themselves or collide into one another.

I grew up an hour away from the coast. I spent many childhood afternoons swimming and building sand castles at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. So while the muddied river water might ruin the illusion for people used to more pristine salt water, I could easily imagine myself at the beach when walking barefoot on the sandy shoreline of the river.

Of course, the vegetation kind of gives away the location. 

But if you find a spot where you can sit, preferably with your feet in the water, and you close your eyes, you might be able to think that you are somewhere tropical--especially in the summer when the sun is beating down on you and the sand is radiating heat back up at you and all you can hear is the roar of water rushing past. 

This is a project that my dear hubby started. He would find large river-tumbled rocks and carry them over one by one until he outlined the path of the trail that lead to the river and beyond. When local boy scouts asked to be given a project, he passed the torch to them, and flagged the path that they could finish marking. I think it looks like art, really. I much prefer it to stakes in the ground or metal posts that carry arrow signs to keep travelers going in the right direction.

This is my favorite double exposure that I've ever taken.

Watching the sun set on a cloudy evening on the banks of the Virgin River. 

I'm still not done with the photos from Cedar Pockets. It has turned into one of my favorite places, and I am sure that I am going to return again soon.

*All of the above photos were taken on my Diana Mini. 

More from the beach

A few more photos from my trip to Galveston Beach. These were taken on my white Diana Mini (which behaves much better than my blue one). I used DIY redscale made from Lucky 200 iso film.
I think it turned out pretty great for my first attempt at redscale. With redscale film you want to slightly overexpose your images since light is going through the film the wrong way. But since the Diana Mini only has aperture settings of "cloudy" and "sunny" I didn't have a lot of control in trying to overexpose my images by one or two stops. So I set my camera to "cloudy" and called it good. Here are some of the things I shot that day:

If you click on the images, you can see them bigger. And if you do that, you might notice that there are faint electric blue lines goes across the top of most of the images. This is a result of the the film getting scratched somewhere mid-roll to the end.
Some people might say that it looks a bit post-apocalyptic, but I like the look of redscale, especially at the beach. I like how this roll turned out-- instead of all the shots being simply bright red or orange, there are a lot of colors going on, they're just muted.
If you are interested in making your own redscale film, you can easily find a lot of tutorials online, but THIS is one I like because the pictures are easy to follow. One note on making your own redscale film-- almost all the tutorials I came across online say that you need to sacrifice one roll of film to do it, but I'd say that's only true if you have no patience whatsoever. Instead, if you stop by somewhere that develops film, just ask them for some of their old film canisters. You'll likely end up with a handful. The easiest ones to use for this kind of thing are the ones with a bit of film still sticking out.

Some days winter isn't too far away

I moved from a land that knew winter. It was a place of snow and cold and ice that could take you by surprise. Here I find that I still get surprised from time to time. In late December we had a freak snow storm that left us with a few inches of snow that stuck around for a couple of days. A couple of weeks ago a similar thing happened. Both times, we were out of town.
However, it isn't too difficult to schedule a trip to the cold during this time of year. A 45min drive results in views like this:

Cedar Mountain. Diana Mini Camera. Lucky 200iso film.

See more of my photos here.