Saturday — 11/14/17.
Something was deeply wrong.
I was supposed to shoot footage for a music video out at the Salton Sea for a friend that day, and my girlfriend was supposed to help style. My friend ended up being really late to meet us in Pasadena to travel out there. Like over an hour. I think my girlfriend and I decided to fuck right off after 30 minutes. Which is 15 minutes too many. We for sure weren’t getting paid for our services.
We decided to go out to the Salton Sea anyway. The trip out was uneventful. Some of the roads are kinda confusing out there. We drove up and down the lake, and decided to visit Salvation Mountain. It was far less offputting, and even inspiring, which is unusual for most godly things.
As the sun started to set, we worked our way over back to the Sea itself, and a view of the mountains behind it at one of the camping areas. It was right around then that everything begun to feel different. It was like the sunset was swallowing up the life around us. Like this lake was an outcropping of the netherworld and perhaps maybe, we should not have been there.
A plane flew overhead as the sun started to go down. At first I thought it was a bomb, then a shooting star. Honestly it could’ve been either one. It was the final harbinger of something terrible. It was the perfect prelude to a tragedy.
I captured it all on my (then) new medium format camera (technical data below the gallery), and I think it does a strong job of showing off exactly how menacing and etherial the whole place was. I also had my 35mm Camera, and I’m putting my favorite shots from that camera here.
Check out the final gallery at Frozenwaste.land/sundown-at-apocalypse-gulch
Technical info:
35mm: Minolta XD11, Rokkor 50mm 1.4 MC PG, 24mm 2.8 MD-X, 100mm 2.5 MC.
Medium Format Analogue Camera: Pentax 6x7 MLU, 105/2.4 + 55/4(final),
Film (120): Kodak Ektar 100, Portra 160, and Fujifilm Provia 100f.
