View Obscura

Tonight I decided to dive back into my archives and I rediscovered a set of photos that I took at the abandoned Mohawk gas station in Oro Grande, California. This old gas station and I go way back. For years I would stop by and take pictures of it when I would visit all the really cool antique stores in this historic town on old Route 66 .   I often wondered about its history so I decided to see what I could out. From my research I was able to find out that all the Mohawk gas stations ceased to exist in 1970 when the company was bought out by another petroleum company. I have to think that this Mohawk station kept the name after that existing as a independent gas station. The $1.99 price for unleaded on the old signage would lead you to believe that it may have been in operation anywhere between the years 2000 to 2003. To be honest I couldn't find anything online about the exact time period when this Mohawk station closed its doors. The Mohawk Oil Company was a Bakersfield, Califo...

In honor of Godzilla: King of the Monsters being featured on Svengoolie  tonight I decided to pull off a mega post of many of my movie stills from the film. These were used to advertise the movie inside theaters while it was being exhibited.   What I always love about the stills produced by Toho to promote their films both in Japan and abroad are that they are almost always composites. That is images that are produced by combining several objects and different images to produce a totally different photograph. A perfect example of this is the photo above, which is actually my favorite Godzilla movie still because of its rather unique composition, in this image you have a photo of Tokyo as the background and then of course you have Godzilla himself - who is made up of the body of the creature as seen in the film with a different head. His left hand as you can see is actually painted to illustrate the monster crushing an airplane. Fire and Japanese fighter planes were added to ...

 This week ended with a spectacular sunset in Meeker. For a long time I used to do a feature called Images Without Context that basically consisted of funny and interesting photos from old TV shows and movies with absolutely no words to describe what they were. I left it up to the viewer to try and figure out what the context was.  A lot of people had fun with those. Today I'm doing it a little different with photos taken all over central Louisiana. In this case I'm providing a smidge of context, but as before I'm letting the pictures do the talking allowing the viewer to see how each image speaks to them. The day started with with and equally spectacular sunrise in Meeker. A vacation property in McNary becomes a raging river due to intense thunder storms early in the week. An interesting car in the Sam's Club parking lot in Alexandria. The sun rises over the cane fields in Lecompte. Check Out: Louisiana Through My Lens - Night Time Shots of Lecompte (And The Winner Is....

 At the beginning of the month I spent a unusually warm Sunday evening walking around downtown taking some night time photos. I wasn't trying to take anything award winning. I was just practicing taking different shots and playing with the settings to see how they would come out.   I did manage to get some shots that I really liked but a good many of them just didn't turn out as planned. It looks like I will need to do more practicing. Just for fun I posted four of the photos from that evening on Facebook and urged my friends and family to vote for the one they liked best. As you can imagine everyone liked different photos for different reasons.  The one that got the most votes was the photo above. It was a narrow victory, each total was separated by just one vote.  I can see why this one was the favorite. It really shows most of the buildings here in downtown Lecompte. I think that I did a really good job on this one adjusting the shutter speed and ISO to where the...

If you ever find yourself parked at the corner of Barstow Road and Granite Road in Lucerne Valley, California the only thing you will be able to determine is that you have found the proverbial middle of nowhere. If you scan around in every direction aren't any landmarks in sight, no buildings, no trees and only a lone street sign to mark this dot on the map.   You could literally walk an hour in any direction and not hit a single object. If it wasn't for the road this location would be as barren as any place on Earth. To be honest I couldn't even make out where Granite Road actually was? Like I mentioned there wasn't anything for miles in every direction. I guess that you could think of Granite Road as the proverbial road to nowhere. You may wonder why I stopped in such a desolate place to take photographs? If I'm honest I would have to admit that it was the street sign in the middle of the desert that caused me to pull over. After standing there for a few moments...