Today we went underground...

..deep, underground. Which is why I don't have a lot of photos to post.

If you've never gone to one of the world's big cave systems before, and you get the chance, go. It's surreal how different underground is from aboveground. Mostly, the scale is what impresses me - things are fractal - a tiny little stalagmite looks a lot like a gigantic one, depending on where you stand. So, it's confusing to the eye and it makes photographing seem kind of pointless to me. There were places where I could have shot something with a zoom/macro and it would have looked like a gigantic, towering column of rock, but, in fact, it would have been less than a foot tall.

The first time I went to Carlsbad Caverns, my buddy bob and I took along 8x10 view cameras. After hiking a mile down steeply inclined paths, and stumbling around and cursing, we decided there was nothing we wanted to photograph down there. This time, I was prepared, and left my camera in the car.

After we left Carlsbad, we went to some amazing nowheresville Texas towns like Kermit and Notree.

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Wrecked stuff, Kermit TX

Now we're at the Super 6 Motel, someplace west of nowhere in particular. Sarah pointed out that I didn't have any pictures to post of her today, so we cooked up the scheme of shooting something of her taking a shower.


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"Are you about ready yet?"

So here's how that one happened: the room we've got is the wheelchair accessible room, and the shower stall is just this big area on the floor. It looked like it'd be cool to shoot one of those "big eyed running makeup tile wet creepy" shots. So I set the camera on the tripod and this shot fired as one of the test images while I was getting the light right. If I posted this with some evil title like "your exam starts now" the viewer would interpret the scene totally differently from what was really happening. Which was: Sarah saying, "is this water ever going to get warm?" and me, "I sure hope so! I'm sorry..." I've had that happen before - the context-setting ability of an image title is extreme.

Now I'm writing and posting this, and Sarah's checking her messages.

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Usually, when she's answering her Emails, she wears this floor-length latex gown, high heels, and a big feather boa...


mjr.