Anza Borrego State Park
Last December Vicki and I spent a few days at Borrego Springs and Anza Borrego State Park. We had been there the year before and it is a great destination after visiting friends and family in San Diego.
Like last time we spent most of the days hiking. The weather is perfect and with blue skies we were blessed with beautiful scenery. The desert is great for black and white photography giving up high contrast images. This desert was surprisingly good as the rocks and sand are very light coloured giving exposures where the sky has tone without a color filter.
One day we hiked to a series of small palm oases in a series bowls or small rocky valleys. Each of these has a small spring to sustain the palms there. There a couple theories about these palms the most appealing is that they are left from the Pleistocene. The area was much wetter and tropical and hosted mega-fauna like Mastodon. Later the mountains rose up and created a rain shadow and the desert conditions that persist. These palms are the few survivors clinging to a few remaining we patches in the canyons.
Here are 4 lone palms is a desolate valley.
These photos were taken with my Mamiya C220 twin lens reflex with a 65mm lens. The film is Ilford FP4+ processed in Ilfotec LC29. They were printed on Ilford MGIV Deluxe RC Pearl paper developed with Ilford Universal PQ. The negatives were of such high contrast I used very little of the #5 filter when printing these.
Like last time we spent most of the days hiking. The weather is perfect and with blue skies we were blessed with beautiful scenery. The desert is great for black and white photography giving up high contrast images. This desert was surprisingly good as the rocks and sand are very light coloured giving exposures where the sky has tone without a color filter.
One day we hiked to a series of small palm oases in a series bowls or small rocky valleys. Each of these has a small spring to sustain the palms there. There a couple theories about these palms the most appealing is that they are left from the Pleistocene. The area was much wetter and tropical and hosted mega-fauna like Mastodon. Later the mountains rose up and created a rain shadow and the desert conditions that persist. These palms are the few survivors clinging to a few remaining we patches in the canyons.
Here are 4 lone palms is a desolate valley.
These photos were taken with my Mamiya C220 twin lens reflex with a 65mm lens. The film is Ilford FP4+ processed in Ilfotec LC29. They were printed on Ilford MGIV Deluxe RC Pearl paper developed with Ilford Universal PQ. The negatives were of such high contrast I used very little of the #5 filter when printing these.
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