Ah, summertime in the desert.
Cars double as ovens. Pools turn into luke-warm bathtubs. Air conditioning is essential, like water, food and the pursuit of happiness. Along with highs in the 116s (and lows in the 100s), we’re also blessed with the occasional haboob.
They usually pop out of nowhere in the late-afternoon in the late-summer months. And when they do, Valley photographers salivate. Yesterday – Saturday, August 11 – was one such occasion. I’d been meaning to try for a nice panoramic, wall-of-dust shot sometime this summer and jumped at the opportunity when this one presented itself.
When I saw the storm approaching from the Southeast, I was home and my car was unavailable. I didn’t want a stock photo of the storm from my driveway, so I loaded up my camera bag, jumped on my road bike and booked it to the mountains just north of my house. Cycling, dehydrated, overheated and tired in a dust storm sucks. But it did give me the chance to arrange this nice profile of my dear Schwinn Traveler.
Lessons learned from this dust-storm shoot?
- Don’t hesitate or make excuses. I saw the storm on the way, dropped everything and went for it. I didn’t think about all the reasons there were to not go (no car, no water, no energy) until I was already sweating it out on my bike. And by that time, I wasn’t coming home empty handed.
- Negative=positive. One could argue not having a car was a setback. But if I was driving, I wouldn’t have had my bike.
- Aim for contrast. I took a lot of photos on this brief, spontaneous shoot. But my favorites were the ones composed to accentuate different forms of contrast. Blue sky and white clouds vs grey wall of dust; dusty sky above, green neighborhoods below; road bike on a mountain trail with a storm approaching; a desert mountain consumed by a desert storm.
