kolbykirk.com

Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Dec

Nicaragua Photos – Round 2

Filed Under galleries, international travel, photography

I created a slideshow of some of my favorite photos from my recent trip. Click on the image below to view them:

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Dec

Nicaragua Photos – Round 1

Filed Under international travel, photography

Here’s a few photos from my recent trip to Nicaragua:

I’ll have more shortly.

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Nov

Fog-tography

Filed Under kahunna.net, local travel, photography, retrotravels.net, YouTube

A night of thick fog is rare here in Arcadia. So when it rolls in, I roll out with my camera and a full tank of gas. Here are the results.

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Nov

For a joint birthday present (mine and my Mom’s), I got to fly up to Bend, Oregon to spend the weekend with my parents. With the wildfires burning up hundreds of homes in Southern California, causing the air quality to drop to levels normally found in coal mines, I could not have chosen a better weekend to escape to the high desert of Central Oregon.

I had a fantastic time with my parents, where we went for hikes, watched the sunrises and sunsets, and relaxed in their nice house. I even was able to see my 92-year old grandmother, who has lived in Bend since my father was born. Although many strokes have slowed her down physically, she’s as mentally spry and clear-eyed as someone half her age. She is a wonderful storyteller and it seems like I hear a new story from her younger days – when she was a painter, alpine hiker, actress, balsa-wood plane maker, waitress, and renowned Native American weaver – every time I see her. I wish I could see her more often.

I came home to Los Angeles on a Monday, where I learned that the air was so bad, they had to cancel the Pasadena Marathon. My friends and co-workers tried to spend as little as possible outside, where the smoke from the fires lingered in the air like tulle fog.

Here are a few photos of the fire I took from the air flying north on Saturday.

My 92-Year Old Grandmother

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Nov

Winter Colors at The Huntington

Filed Under local travel, photography

There are still vivid colors about at The Huntington Gardens. In fact, the weather was so nice, it was easy to imagine that this was spring rather than winter.

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Nov

My First Journal

Filed Under entomology, graphic design, photography

Do you remember your first notebook? The first time you kept a journal or diary? Notebookism.com asked their readers to share the roots of their obsession of notebooks. This has inspired me to find my first notebook/journal and rediscover what interests I had when I was much younger.

It didn’t take long to find the dusty book and when I sat down and perused the pages, I was surprised to discover that many obsessions I have now took root in this 13-year-old journal: astronomy, zoology, entomology, travel, exploration, art, to name a few.

I’d like to share a few pages and talk about them.

I bought this notebook from Barnes & Noble in the summer of 1995. I would have been 19 years old at the time. The bookplate in the rear of the book tells me that the type of notebook is a “Wire Bound” by Michael Roger Press, Inc. out of New York and it was printed in 1992.

I glued on a collapsible folder I’m pretty sure I designed and made myself to hold the newspaper clippings, postcards, letters, and other papers I thought might be interesting to hold on to.

The first entry, from August 8th, 1995, starts with:

As you can see, today I decided to start a diary or journal. I wanted to actually get onto paper my goals, plans, thoughts & feelings of archaeology and the role it will play (or how I would like it to play) in my life.

Although I didn’t finish my studies as an archaeologist, it did open the door to related fields I pursue today.

August 5th, 1995, I wrote:

I, Kolby Kirk, plan on being out of the Continental US by the summer of 1996. I will be able to send a postcard back to my parents showing that I am on an archaeological dig. Signed: Kolby Kirk

I eventually made it out of the country and visited an archaeological dig… in 2001.

In 1995, before the Internet and instant knowledge, I invented something I called the “VRchaeology”. According to the entry, it would be able to translate any language, “lost, dead, ect.”, with the help of video equipment and virtual reality. I based the prototype off of a Nintendo Gameboy. I wonder if the technology exists yet to make this thing?

The page on the right is a drawing of Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD, an event that I read about at an early age and started my fascination with archaeology. I fulfilled my childhood dream of visiting the ruins of Pompeii and hiking to the top of the volcano in 2001.

The page above is a record of my first trip to Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It looks like the map on the right page is of the museum’s multi-building campus, and the map on the left is of the Egyptian exhibit on display there at the time (November, 1995).

I wrote very neat and small at nineteen years old. If you’ve seen any of my more recent journals, you can see that I still write this small (but probably not as neat).

I obsessively collected National Geographic Magazines in my late teens and early 20s, which I’ve talked about here on this blog before. I wrote about my bookstore discoveries like I just found some ancient artifact in the jungles of Peru. My obsession with the magazine peaked around 1997, when I owned all but sixteen issues from 1913 to 1997. Now I just own a few shelves of just the oldest ones, but I still subscribe to the magazine’s sister publications (NG Traveler Magazine, NG Adventure Magazine).

To help figure out how rare a National Geographic Magazine was, I graphed out the number of NGS members. Looks like I made a graph with Microsoft Excel for Windows 95. I was such a geek! Wait – I still am, but the only difference is now I get paid to graph out stuff in Excel.

The history of National Geographic maps during World War II in one page. Looking at the size of that writing, I could have made some money writing people’s names on grains of rice.

I’m surprised to discover in this journal that I followed the war in Bosnia pretty closely. Here, on the right, is a sketch of the Dayton Peace Agreement signing, ending the three year war in Eastern Europe. I did a quick search and found the photograph I used for the sketch.

On the left, a newspaper cutout from November, 1995 of the estimated number of Bosnian refugees per 100,000 population in Europe. According to the map, there’s over 500 in Sweden, more than any other European country. I commented, “Only one thing I want to know: WHAT’S IN SWEDEN!?” I have since visited Bosnia and I’m sure one day I’ll see what’s in Sweden.

The left shows a representation of how much potable water there is in the world based on a fact in National Geographic Magazine: “If all Earth’s water fit in a gallon jug, available fresh water would equal just over a tablespoon.”

I loved bugs all my life, it seems. Here on the left, in December of 1995, I drew a cicada and a Jerusalem cricket I had found on an archaeological dig. (More on this over at my other site, bugshutterbug.com.)

On the left is a sketch of Mount Pinatubo erupting in The Philippines. It had erupted in June of that year. A few facts I wrote down about the eruption:

It was one hundred times more powerful than the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens in 1980.
Typhoon Yunya was just starting to hit the island at the same time.
The release of the volcano will lower the temperature of the earth one degree for the next five years.
It was so big, it created its own weather, including lightning.
1.4 million people were dispursed, 50,000 homeless, 560,000 jobless, and 900 dead.

A page dedicated to the Galileo spacecraft, which had arrived at Jupiter in December, 1995, completing it’s 6-year journey. According to Wikipedia, it lived another seven years orbiting the planet.

On the left, a drawing of an ad for a National Geographic television special on sharks. I wonder, what year did Discovery’s “Shark Week” begin? On the right, an entry on the “weather weirdness” that occurred that January (1996). Apparently, it was unusually warm in Los Angeles while New York was experiencing “the worst storm of the century.”

I met a family from Perth in late 1996, starting an interest in the eastern Australian city. On the left is a map of the city I drew, most likely based off of a map produced by the National Geographic Society. (This was still a time before the Internet). On the right is a something I drew based off of a Fox Trot comic strip. I looked forward to reading Fox Trot when I read the newspaper. I think I drew this based on the recent news that the comic’s creator, Bill Amend, was retiring.

An ode to Stonehenge. I don’t know how I had the patience or the skill to draw everything on this page in negative with permanent marker.

Speaking of things that I did for fun that I’m now being paid to do: here’s a map of the languages in the Caucasus Region (Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Chechnia, Azerbaijan). I’m creating a similar map for a project I’m working on today!

4-year-old Sonam Wangdu recognized by the Tibetan Buddhists as the Reincarnation of Lama Deshung Rinpoche III, a beloved scholar and teacher, who died here (in Seattle, WA) in 1987 at the age of 81. Before he died, Deshung told two students he would be reborn in Seattle. And on November 12, 1991, according to dreams and other auspicious signs, he was. The boy was born as Sonam Wangdu to an American mother and Tibetan father. He leaves for the Tharlam Monastery near Kathmandu, Nepal, for a life of celibacy and study.

I remember my Mom let me stay home to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was so devastating to see, on live television, the explosion of the shuttle and the deaths of seven astronauts. On this page, I drew the sequence of events leading up to the tragic event.

Giant Squids! Still a major fascination of mine. There such mysterious creatures. If something so large could “hide” from scientists for this long, imagine what other creatures are out there that has yet to cross paths with humans?

During the summer of 1996, I taught archaeology and astronomy to children at a YMCA camp in the local mountains. The idea of teaching astronomy came in a pow-wow meeting earlier in the year, but little did I know at the time that I’d be the one teaching it. I knew nothing about astronomy beyond the introductory class I took in college, but soon I could spend an hour pointing out constellations and telling stories of their name’s origins. I still love sitting out under the stars any chance I can get. Even though some of the names and stories have slipped from memory, the vastness of the sky is awesome to look upon.

On the left here is a map of the camp I worked at. This was the summer of Comet Hale-Bopp, the most famous comet since Haley in 1983. I was lucky enough to live in an area without light pollution, allowing us to see the fuzzy comet (with the help of a telescope).

My first night at camp and I was almost attacked by a mother raccoon protecting its four kits (babies). They had broke into the cabin where I was sleeping on the living room couch. I woke up to see the big mama staring me down just 2 feet from my face. I fell in love with the Great Outdoors that night.

More astronomy-related entries during that great summer living in the mountains.

A page spread dedicated to meteors and the damage they cause when they strike earth. There’s nothing like learning to appreciate life by scaring the bejesus out of kids with stories of mass destruction and possible human extinction.

Sunday, September 1st, 1996: A journal entry dedicated to the recent eruption of the twin volcanoes, Vulcan and Tavurvur, in the South Pacific.

Sunday, September 2nd, 1996: A journal entry dedicated to “space weather”, which some believe caused the blackout of 1996.

Sunday, September 3rd, 1996: A journal entry dedicated to Easter Island and its mysterious statues.

Some information on the volcanic activity in Yellowstone National Park.

Have you ever heard of the stratosphere balloon called The Explorer? If not, you should read about it in the October 1934 issue of National Geographic. If you don’t happen to have that issue laying around, take a look around the web for more details. It’s really fascinating stuff! I thought so and it inspired me to draw this picture.

Also drawn based on a National Geographic story is the tarantula. (More on this over at my other site, bugshutterbug.com.)

I got to witness a lunar eclipse while living in Irivine, CA. This spread records my viewing of the phenomenon. I still take time to watch lunar eclipses, but now I usually record the event with my camera rather than with a notebook.

In the Autumn of 1996, I worked as a security guard at a computer chip company in Tustin, California. Across the street from the company’s campus was a large field where hawks would sit atop light poles or trees, intently watching the strawberry fields for prey. I was fascinated with these intelligent birds and their amazing eyesight and spent many days at work watching them survey the ground or soaring gracefully over the land, occasionally picking off rabbits and mice with their sharp talons. In this entry, I write how I rollerbladed to this field and watched the hawks armed with binoculars and a disposable camera (my camera of choice for many years). Although I didn’t write about it here, reading the entry brings back a thought I had about the future of the birds. I wondered how long they would be winged kings of this large swath of land before the city covered it with more buildings. I haven’t been back to Tustin for many years, but I do think these strawberry fields have been replaced by buildings. I wonder if the hawks have adapted to the change or have they moved away. On the map above, I highlighted in blue the range of the hawks, according to my observations.

When the English Patient came out in November of 1996, it quickly became my favorite movie of all time. I ended up seeing it over six times in the theater, read the book, met the author, and owned it on VHS and DVD. I saw it recently and it still holds up as a great film about archaeology, geography, romance and adventure. I still listen to the soundtrack from time to time on my iPod.

I walked into an old wooden bench and was impaled by the largest sliver I’ve ever received. It took thirty minutes for a nurse to remove it. She showed no mercy in doing so. I don’t know if I had intentionally taped up the actual sliver on the same spread as a photo of a rhinoceros, but the coincidence is humorous.

Photos from my days as an archaeologist. Again my camera of choice is a disposable Kodak camera. I didn’t start using a “real” camera until 2001 and purchased my first SLR in 2006.

The collapsible pocket I attached to the back of the journal has an eerie resemblance to the (much smaller) pocket found on Moleskine journals. Maybe that’s a subliminal reason why the notebooks became a journal of choice since 2004?

To see more scanned pages, head on over to my other site, bugshutterbug.com.

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Oct

Mohave Meandering

Filed Under local travel, photography, urban-explorers.com

I think I am becoming a Desert Rat. Like many of those who call the desert home, I’ve fallen in love with the dry desolation the Mohave offers. I find relaxation in the solitude, where your eyes can search the horizon in vain for another human being. This expansiveness captured my attention on my first trip to the Mohave, but my most recent trip introduced me to the world found at the opposite end of the spectrum: the minuscule. Early Saturday morning I returned to the Mohave Desert to enjoy both the large and the small of it. I would end up visiting the most desolate place I’ve been in my life.

The last major civilization is Twentynine Palms, CA. Although it is home of the world’s largest Marine Base, the desert community consists of people from many ways of life. As like a waterhole in the African Serengeti where all sorts of animals can make an appearance, so is the case at a Twentynine Palms’ pub. I noticed one across from the gas station I stopped at; motocross bikes and horses were tethered to the railing. If I had more time, I would have gone in to grab a beer with the desert rats to hear some of their stories.

I headed east out of Twentynine Palms and the city was soon in my rear view mirror. Soon all I could see was miles of tough land with a few tough people living on it. Some of these houses looked identical to any house in the suburbs, as if they fell from the sky like in The Wizard of Oz. Outside the city, services were scarce for visitor and citizen alike. Old power lines draped next to the two-lane paved road, but stray far and not only do the power lines disappear, but so does the pavement. Side streets are nothing more than sandy paths carved into the desert, their identification handcrafted by those living on them. Some street signs included the names of all the residents.

Eastbound eventually became northbound, and I crossed into the Cadiz Valley. If one could define the solitude of a place by how much information can be found about it on Wikipedia, Cadiz Valley might possibly be the loneliness place in the US. There’s nothing on Cadiz Valley, nor the Bristol Mountains to the north in the online Encyclopedia. The US Census Bureau reported in 2000 that just 23 souls called this 424 square miles of land home.

But this wasn’t always the case. Amboy used to be a main rest stop for those traveling east on Route 66. By 1940, over 2.5 million people had left their homes in the midwest to try to find a better life. Of those, 200,000 moved to California and had most likely traveled through this area.

I’m sure the people who still live here have to create their own recreational activities. I wandered onto what must be their television shooting range out on Bristol Dry Lake.

Bristol Dry Lake was once not so dry, and I tried picturing how the area looked when it was filled with water and life millions of years ago. Now, the lake is a major source of the country’s table salt. Mining has been going strong here since they started operations in 1910. They say there’s 60 million tons still in the ground, so we’ll have salt on the table for centuries to come.

This water-filled trench is man made. According to Cargill Salt, salt is created by solar evaporation:

“Solar salt is produced through the natural evaporation of sea water or other naturally occurring brine. Salt water is captured in shallow ponds and allowed to evaporate by means of the sun and wind. During the process, a salt bed forms on the bottom of the pond. The salt is harvested, washed, screened and packaged. The typical solar “crop” takes from one to five years to produce.”

I was there after hours on a Saturday, so everything that might have been active was not. I wouldn’t be surprised if most most of the area’s residents work at this mine. Either way, the 200 census reports that the average household income of these 23 residents was $127K a year, so something in the area is paying the bills.

I reached Amboy Crater just as the sunlight faded over the horizon. Many Southern Californians would be surprised to hear that they could take a day trip to climb a volcano. The volcano has been extinct for a while and the crater was created about 6,000 years ago, leaving behind one of the the most symmetrical volcanic cinder cones.

I watched the silhouette of the crater – which stands about 250 feet above the desert floor – fade into the landscape as the sun set and the stars came out. Another trip would be needed to explore the volcano more closely, so I headed back to Joshua Tree National Park to take a few long exposure photographs before heading home.

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Oct

Life of a Joshua Tree

Filed Under local travel, photography, YouTube

It was four years ago this month that I made my first trip to Joshua Tree National Park. I remember how bizarre the desert landscape appeared upon arrival, with its huge boulders the size of buildings and strangely formed “trees.” It was like walking into a Dr. Seuss book.

Since then, I have been back to the park over a dozen times, learning something new about desert life with every visit. For instance, I never knew that the desert could be so full of life year round. I’ve been to Joshua Tree while the land is baking in triple-digit temperatures of the summer. I’ve also had the luck and privilege of seeing snow fall on the park. Whatever the weather, life seems to keep going in the desert through even the harshest of conditions.

For this blog post, I wanted to share the life cycle of the Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia) in photos I have taken the last four years. With my last trip, I’ve now captured most of the stages of the yucca.

It all starts with a seed…

The photo above shows a single yucca seed still in a pod. They have the shape and texture of a watermelon seed, but are slightly flatter and rounder.

Although it is called a tree, it is actually a member of the lily family. Its white and rubbery flower is visited by many different insects, but pollination is done by the yucca moth. While laying its eggs in the flower, gathering pollen in the process.

In the summer, green bulbous pods about the size of avocados begin to grow on the tree.

By the fall, the pods have dried out and become very brittle.

Eventually the pods – as well as the flowers – fall off of the tree. The pods are indehiscent and cannot naturally release its seed. Researchers at the USGS and the University of Nevada, Reno reported in 2007 that they believe the seeds are disbursed by rodents who tear open the pods and collect the seeds. During the Ice Age, scientists believe that Joshua Trees were disbursed by Giant Sloths.

Here is a pod husk after the seeds have been taken.

Research has found that a winter freeze will stunt the growth of a tree in a way that will cause the tree to grow in a new direction.

Joshua Trees grow at an extremely slow rate. For the first few years, it might not reach a height of 12 inches. After that, it tends to grow just an inch or two a year on average. Since they do not have growth rings like a tree do, it is hard to measure the age of a Joshua Tree, but those in the know say that the oldest living Joshua Tree is close to 1,000 years old and stands over forty feet in height!

The largest I have found in the park is just east of Sheep Pass and could easily be over 800 years old:

The future of the Joshua Tree does not look good. Reports suggest that global warming might cause the tree to die off. In 2006, a fire killed many trees in the park.

Until that day, when Joshua Tree National Park might need to be renamed “The National Park That Once Had Joshua Trees”, I’ll be making as many visits as possible to study and photograph these unique plants.

References:

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Sep

Shootin’ Up Los Angeles III

Filed Under local travel, photography, urban-explorers.com

Not too long ago, I created a photography group called Shootin’ Up Los Angeles (SULA). The idea was to explore different areas of Los Angeles with cameras and a desire to share photography ideas. Anyone with a camera is welcome to join SULA, no matter if they own a top-of-the-line SLR or just a disposable. As the saying goes, It’s not the camera that makes a good shot, it’s the photographer. I find that photographing with other people inspires more creativity and sharing of photographic ideas.

So on Thursday, September 18th, a two friends and I headed to downtown Los Angeles. I was hoping for a larger turn out, but with just three of us, it allowed us to get around much faster than if we had more people. In fact, for SULAII, we had just enough time to explore a few streets in Pasadena and Chinatown. But the amount of terrain covered is not the point of SULA – it’s seeing the world through the perspective of other Angelino photographers, which hopefully leads to creativity and growth.

To see the other photos, check out my SULA flickr group. Here are a few of my photos: