Red Rock Canyon State Park

May 2005

The desert in the spring is truly a wonderful place. For the past few years I've had the good fortune of getting out into it. One spring weekend I decided to take my new car out for a drive and go back to Red Rock Canyon. I fell in love with the rock formations the last time I was here, and now I was about to experience it in a whole new light.

The surprises started as I exited the Los Angeles forest and began poking my way into the desert. I started to see all of these strange things crossing the road. At first I thought they were leaves or trash, but soon there were more and more of them. Butterflies. Small butterflies were everywhere in the Mojave. When I pulled into Red Rock, I would understand why. Although I thought it was past the main bloom, the desert floor was still blanketed with flowers of all different types and colors. The butterflies seemed like they were swarming all over them! Every little turn offered a new kind of flower, a daisy, a purple bush, a flowering cactus, and of course more butterflies. I was so used to the desert as being such an empty place. I suppose the wet winter happily proved me wrong. I'm glad I was able to have such a unique experience in this beautiful desert.

The Photographs

The pictures were taken with my Minolta system starting with a roll of Kodachrome PKL 200 followed by a roll of Kodachrome PKR 64 and another PKL. The first PKL was from a batch I managed to find in New York City that I wanted to test out. The colors look gorgeous, so hopefully I'll have another year's supply of this wonderful film. My old Polaroid SprintScan also died right after I had finished scanning the first PKL roll. The remaining shots were scanned on its replacement, a Minolta Dimage 5400, after wrangling to get it working with a Mac. The Minolta scanner definitely seems sharper than the older Polaroid.

Click "Next" in the upper right to begin.