Organ Pipe, Joshua Tree, 2010

It was approaching the end of the year and Thanksgiving had taken be back East. Time for Kodachrome was about to end. I took out my atlas and started to go through the map, listing places I had never been to use my favourite film when my finger crossed over Organ Pipe. I remembered passing through nearly a decade ago, loving wandering among the desert, just only getting started into photography. So I found a weekend of good weather and made my way back.

The land there was beautiful and solitary. Surrounded by the towering saguaro and friendly but painful cholla I was able to hike around for entire days withotu seeing anyone. After initially getting lost I was able to find old mines and pulleys that I remembered having so much fun photographing so long ago. The clouds danced through the sky and again I was happy.

Unfortunately it seemed enjoying the desert was something uncommon enough to make me get detained needlessly by park rangers, where wandering around in solitude taking pictures was "suspicious activity". How sad that the thing wrecking this gorgeous place were the people ostensibly tasked to protect and help us enjoy it.

On the way back home I stopped back in Joshua Tree, another place I had never photographed on Kodachrome. I had originally hoped to spend an entire day, but after the harassment in Organ Pipe I had to settle for just a few hours. At least I had the ability to see this place one last time with this film, even if just for a moment.

The Photographs

Kodachrome is ending, so I planned this and the beauty of the wonderful cacti of the desert as my last excursion with a film I'd come to love and learned to use to capture some beautiful images. It was my first outing with a replacement SRT102 body for the Pro one where my lightmeter died in Colorado, but this time brought my handheld meter just in case. Since my last trip I had also made a new acquisition, a Bellows Lens, so was having lots of fun playing around in a newfound world of macro photography. Too bad I hadn't found one of these earlier!

Seeing as this was the end of Kodachrome, I used out the last of what I had been saving of my favourite film. I started off with my last roll of PKR 64, followed by my last roll of KR 64 in the sunset, then my final roll of KM 25 in the glancing rays of sunrise. The final two rolls were PKL 200.

Click "Next" in the upper right to begin.