Night photo showing the movement of the stars in this long exposure photo. As a small child, one of the first words I liked to say was "choo choo train". I loved trains so much as a four year old, my grandmother used to take me to the rail yard in Skokie, Illinois to watch the trains come in. Although I really don't know very much about trains, I still love them, and having the opportunity to photograph them at night feels so special to me. This is a view of the night stars streaking over a 1920s Rio Grande dinner car which had an air conditioning unit with an ice system. Built by American Car and Foundry for The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad in 1927, the "Castle Peak" was one of four cars built concurrently, named for famous "Peaks" along the route of the D&RGW. This car was used until the late 1960s, and has been resting under the stars of the Mojave for decades. Back in the distance is a Union Pacific railcar. I lit the dinner car with warm white light from a handheld ProtoMachines LED2 light painting device during the exposure, while the light of the car in the distance were already on.
Night photo of one of the abandoned Dunes Motel in Lenwood, CA along Route 66, the nation’s first year round highway linking Chicago to Los Angeles, prompting the migration out West, escaping the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Much of the homes and businesses along Route 66 dried up in the 1950s when the highway system, including Interstate 40, were built, bypassing "The Mother Road".
Midnight mystery under the trees and the stars. Charles Manson and the "Manson Family" lived at Spahn Ranch, an old Western town movie set, in the late 1960s, and have left an indelible mark on Southern California, and movies such as "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" show that they will not be forgotten. Manson had a "right hand" man named Bruce Davis who drove a Corvair. This rusty 1960s Corvair is hidden in the rocky mountains just above where Spahn Ranch was and is likely his. Some now refer to this car as the Zodiac Car due to a popular myth that Bruce Davis was involved in the Zodiac killing, although this was never fully established. If this car could tell stories, they'd likely be stories of horror and violence. How this or the other cars got up here remains a mystery. This long exposure image was photographed on a warm breezy evening, hiking almost 2 miles round trip to get here. On the way back, I discovered another car, making me wonder how many other secrets these hills hold.
