Diet Taco... trying to keep things light

Mojave National Preserve - Part 1
November 2023

Early November I traditionally visit Mojave National Preserve as it is a poor time to visit Death Valley with the 49er Encampment overrunning the park. This year the larger issue was Death Valley still recovering from being overrun by Hillary. Work issues conspired to make this my only trip of the fall season and it nearly looked like weather might be the undoing of even this trip. As the date approached it looked like at least the early part of the week might be tenable so I made the usual airborne pilgrimage from Maryland.

This time my brother tagged along as his schedule was open for at least the first few days. We did our provisioning in Vegas as usual, grabbed the obligatory In and Out, and made the relatively short drive down to the Baker area. With weather potentially truncating the trip we made the most of the day with a short hike that was a repeat for me. On our trips we usually try to take one "epic" brothers photo and this was a likely spot.

Typical Mojave Sunset
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Since there was actually someone to talk to I made the unusual provision of firewood and we had a nice campfire before bed. I realized how tired I was when I almost brushed my teeth with Neosporin.

The next morning we explored some mines and cabins and I even manged to drive a good way up the wrong canyon at one point having attempted a route from memory rather than consulting the map all of seven inches from my steering wheel. Next we found a nice campsite for the second night tucked in a lava flow and had an early lunch. Then it was time to head out for our second hike.

The temperatures were mild but it was still nice to have some shade umbrellas for the climb to the top of a highest cinder cone. The hike was entirely within a wilderness area but some old roads made the approach a lot easier than hiking cross country over a lava field. While they made for some ugly scars, we were similarly thankful for the somewhat insane roads that zig-zagged and spiraled around the cone to the top. The crater at the top has a small lake bed in it not too mention panoramic views of a vast swath of the Mojave.

Cinder Cones and Lava Fields
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The hike back down the cone was now delightfully in the shade and we enjoyed another camp fire that evening. While on the cone we managed to get cell signal and were happy to discover that the incoming weather shouldn't arrive until later the next day meaning we could probably get one more hike in.

Clouds the next morning promised a change in the weather and we made the drive first thing to the Lanfair Valley and the New York Mountains. I was rather depressed with the prospect of seeing the ravages of yet another massive fire in the preserve, but decided I would make the most of it by retaking a photograph from a few years prior to show the ravages of the fire. Driving the route of the Mojave Road across the western part of Lanfair I was somewhat surprised to be in a vibrant Joshua Tree forest with no signs of fire at all! We continued to the east and along a lesser used road to get to what I was certain was well within the burn area for my photo.

Well, arriving there everything was just as it had been before! It appears the burn was very patchy and so the burn maps are pessimistic in some areas. Having driven all this way I didn't want to waste the trip and the clouds were making a different scene than the original sunny version of this photo. For extra effect I shot with an infrared converted camera for this repeat composition.

Untouched by fire
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From here it was a relatively short drive to our trailhead. This I knew for certain was impacted by the fire, but I was also fairly certain the hike itself was not. Indeed as we approached the New York Mountains themselves the landscape was ravaged by fire and here was another Joshua Tree forest potentially gone forever. The closer we got to the trailhead the worse it got and we could see what must have been some amazingly nice campsites now just a blackened moonscape. Thankfully as we approached the mouth of the canyon we were to hike up the fire stopped with only a few burn patches on the slopes near the mouth of the canyon.

The weather was getting breezy at this point and now being at elevation things were getting pretty chilly. Not to mention we could see thin virga from some of the clouds. It was time to get the hike done and soon. It was a delightful hike through a lush canyon bottom and we climbed a road into a side canyon hosting an old mine. This hike is probably better done in warmer weather, but something about the clouds, the cold, and the sprinkles highlighted the loneliness of this special place.

I only brought my infrared converted camera on this hike, so you'll have to suffer through slightly psychedelic photos...

Former Accommodations


Former Transportation


Bridge to Nowhere
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We scurried back to our vehicles as the skies were getting darker. Rain was clearly on its way and it was forecast to be a cold, wet night. It was time for my brother to hit the road anyway and so we decided that prime rib and warm beds in Vegas were the sensible choice.

But the weather forecast appeared to promise that the storm would pass in the night and that I at least might still be able to get in the third full day of my trip. That day is for another post, but for now, since they don't fit well anywhere else, are two other spots I visited in the remainder of the trip.

Familiar Sight
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Those who have followed this thread might recognize these unusually shaped microwave antennae and know their historical significance. I took the opportunity to visit another one of these sites this trip in my slightly obsessive quest to visit all of them in the Mojave.

Wacky Camera + Wacky Lens
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Besides the new to me full frame infrared camera body that I brought along this trip I also brought a new slightly insane lens - a 9mm rectilinear full frame lens. OK, it isn't slightly insane, it is really insane. It is extremely hard to work with not to mention figuring out just what the heck to even use it for. I needed a break driving from Barstow to Vegas to catch my flight and this photo was the result.

My favorite photos, however, were that day after the storm. Those will have to be in another post though.

 

This was still there, huh? I was sure it would have been consumed by flames! I'm thrilled to know that it wasn't.

Definitely a bit more overgrown than in 2020!



The canyon next door (and mine camp there) didn't fair as well.

 

Man you've got an eye for good photography. Great shots. Do you have an instagram? You should if you don't. Would get a lot of attention and probably some free shit from vendors.

 

Dang. I’m fairly certain this last fire torched those beautiful campsites at the end of Caruthers Canyon. Road has been closed forever, but post fire satellite imagery appeared to show it was all gone. The last time I stopped there for lunch a few years ago I was thinking “this tinderbox is not going to be here much longer.” Sadly it was still much too soon.

Thank you!

I’m one of those insufferable “SoCiAl MeDiA iS eViL” types, so no. But I appreciate the compliment nonetheless!

 

Sorry to confirm the bad news for you. Those great sites at the end of Caruthers are "gone." Or, they are burned - the rock work is still there, of course.

(my last arrival | departure, and a few around the Easter Island Rock site below, just at sunrise...)

 

Ah, I didn’t realize the road had finally opened! I’m way behind in your trip reports.

Well, the rocks themselves will still at least be interesting and provide some wind break, but naturally just not what it once was.

 

Hey I actually really respect that. Social media is evil, and that's demonstrated in my addiction to it. Haha.

 

What is social media?........

 

A place to brag about shit you did because some other person gave you a play by play of how to do it. It's a viscous feedback loop that sucks the life out of adventure and fun.

 

Notice me Daddy, notice me....

 

Excellent work as always. I really like the tones you get with ... whatever you did to that poor camera. The B&W is stunning too.

I'm curious if you'll share your thoughts on that lens--I've been pondering getting one of this type.

The extreme field of view would seem the most obvious selling point, but after a couple of years now shooting with a 12mm fisheye, I suspect the rectilinear optics might actually be the more interesting aspect. I am surprised by how infrequently I find rectilinear correction to be aesthetically pleasing for the fisheye shots--unless there is strong linear content or orthogonal framing, and in that case I usually discover that I didn't frame the shot as hoped because I was looking at the drunken fisheye image, in addition to not being very good at this in general, and possibly actually drunk. In any case, the remapping cuts down usable resolution considerably, and draws out the weaknesses of what is otherwise a pretty fantastic lens. So the question then is whether a RL lens will lead to better or more-enjoyable wide-angle photography, as a companion to a fisheye... or if I simply prefer the look of fisheye distortion in most cases.

So I guess I'm asking if you find the RL lens to be particularly enjoyable or useful as compared to a fisheye.

I am tempted by the 10mm offering that was recently announced, especially now that I see it can be ordered without autofocus (which I'd consider a non-starter for such a wide lens, but what do I know). Being faster than the 9mm has led me to favor 10mm in other hobbies, and that joke would presumably never get old. But I'm also puzzled by its teensy front optic and wonder if it would actually put much more light on the sensor. I'll probably wait for real-world reviews on that one, but now's your chance to talk me out of the whole concept. And you are so good at talking me out of buying camera stuff!

Yeah, it was a relief to see those cart rails still standing! Hopefully I'll actually see them with my own eyes this year. And frustrated I missed out on what was lost to the fire... I was so excited when I bought the EMHT books the other year, but somehow it's 2024 already and I still haven't tackled it.

 

Technically someone else had the camera molested and then I purchased it used. I had sort of told myself I was done with IR stuff, but the price was too good to pass up (converted body priced a few hundred below market prices for unconverted, which was decidedly backwards). Still a pain dealing with lenses in the IR, but using a FF sensor now at least I've got more leeway in post processing at base ISO than with the smaller sensor IR cameras I'd been working with.

Really good question. The answer is very much an "it depends" kind of thing, but there are in my opinion a lot of cons to such an UWA rectilinear lens. At the same time a fish-eye is already fairly exotic and low use as well, so it is kind of deciding which long list of cons is shorter than the other. And then there are some wrinkles in making valid comparisons between the two options...

Before we get to the utility of FE vs RL at UWA it is worth noting some practical issues:

• You can get amazingly sharp, reliably manufactured FE lenses for dirt cheap. The TTArtisans 11/2.8 FE goes on sale for as low as $190. It is so stupidly sharp that I found defishing it produced a sharper image than the Laowa 11/4.5 RL that I tested. Now I did this on a 47MP sensor, so I didn't have defishing resolution problems, but still that's a simultaneous statement about how good the fisheye is and how bad the Laowa is. That particular Laowa is a "bridge to far" design trying to make the lens too small in my opinion... I've had great luck with some other fish-eyes in other formats and I don't see many complaints about "bad copies" of fish-eye lenses. Something about the optical design seems to make fish-eyes less sensitive to assembly tolerances I suspect, but of course I don't really know.
  
• Many Chinese FE lenses like to "lie" about their focal length which makes things very confusing. The aforementioned TTArtisans 11/2.8 is actually about a 15mm lens - like pretty much all full frame FE lenses. They labeled it as "11mm" because they provide on their website a profile that defishes it to an equivalent 11mm rectilinear view! Now there are a few variations in fish-eye projections, so not unusual to see some variation in focal length for a 180° diagonal fisheye, but 11mm is not a valid answer for full frame!
  
• While it seems quality UWA FE lenses are a dime a dozen, it appears extremely difficult to reliably manufacture compact UWA RL designs. You'll note this in review sections where one person says a given lens is the bee's knees while someone else says it is blurrier than a reused coke bottle. I tried two copies of the Laowa 9/5.6 and both were badly "decentered". It wasn't just a lens mount tilt either, since I shimmed them to attempt to make them usable. Some internal lens element was out of whack. The lens used on this trip was the relatively new 7Artisans 9/5.6 and I had to spend a lot of time shimming it to get to what I considered a reasonable compromise. I was fairly satisfied, but it still didn't match what some online reviews showed. After the trip I tried the Brightin Star version of the same lens. What a revelation! Much better performance and corner sharpness matched online reviews. So yeah, I tried four different copies of Chinese UWA rectilinear lenses before I got one of acceptable quality... If you go this route make sure you order from a place with a good return policy rather than directly from the manufacturers who have fairly draconian return policies.
  
• Smaller UWA RL lens designs for mirrorless keep their designs small by using a more symmetric design than those designed for SLRs that were forced to use reverse telephoto designs. The end result is that the exit pupil is much, much closer to the sensor. This results in two issues. One is massive vignetting even when stopped down (this is because of cosine to the fourth light fall off from the close exit pupil which is independent of aperture setting). The second is often some color shift across the sensor (e.g. left looks a bit blue, right looks a bit red) due to the oblique angle of the light hitting the sensor. Fish-eye designs typically don't have these issues or they are at least much less of an issue.

That is a long way of saying that in my experience the RL lenses just start out with more issues than the FE lenses. Now I suspect if one ponied up the cash for something like the Canon RF 10-20/4L that such quality issues would be much less, but the contents of your wallet would be much less as well.

Now as far as actually composing with the lenses go assuming you've got a "good copy" of each...

Fish-eye definitely has an obvious aesthetic that often overwhelms everything else about the composition. I think this is why mine usually end up on the shelf and rarely used. This is also probably why so many people de-fish to some degree or another. On the other hand such a obviously distorted projection can actually work really well in some situations, and honestly might be easier to compose with than something like a 9mm full frame RL (see below).

With a high resolution sensor a fish-eye can in theory be a really flexible UWA option. You can choose to de-fish it to various degrees and the crop the final composition from there. Often a full rectilinear de-fishing is not what is desired and a number of intermediate options produce a better result.

The issue is that it is beyond me to figure out in the field what the heck a de-fished version is going to look like! So I really have trouble composing with a fish-eye unless the final result is going to be pretty close to fish-eye. So if I actually want the fish-eye projection they are inexpensive, surprisingly high optical quality lenses. Problem is I often don't particularly care for fish-eye...

The rectilinear UWA, or in the case of 9mm I'd say SIWA (Stupidly Insane Wide Angle), is a different kettle of fish. Now you don't have the obvious fish-eye effect overwhelming the composition and WYSIWYG as far as composing in the field goes. The issue is that it is often already challenging to compose with something like a 14mm full frame lens and taking that to 9mm really amplifies the issues. You have to be stupidly close to your subject usually. The extreme perspective distortion can become just as much of an overwhelming effect as the fish-eye if you aren't careful. It is a constant battle not to just have giant fields of nothing in the composition.

Check out some of the YT reviews for the various 9mm RL lenses - almost all the reviewers mention just how much trouble they had composing with these lenses. Bastian K (from phillipreeve.net) is the only person I've seen be consistently successful with such lenses. That's actually part of the reason I got one, I was just curious about the challenge of using one.

The "benefit" to me of the RL version is that some successful compositions depend on using extreme perspective distortion without fisheye to fool the eye. One of my favorite Badwater photos did this with a 14mm FF equivalent:

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What's going on there is that the camera is actually about seven feet above the ground and the set of salt polygons in the foreground are actually gigantic compared to those in the background (I could lay inside one if I had wanted to). This combined with the UWA lens creates a forced perspective that makes the salt field seem even more infinite than it is. You can't pull that trick with a fish-eye projection really. In theory more extreme versions of the same trick could be pulled with a 9mm.

The other thing one can do is various "framed" or "window" compositions that simply don't work unless you get really close to the frame/window. Here is an example from an upcoming post:

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In order to get the building to fit inside the gateway I had to be extremely close to the gateway. In fact I could touch those posts without even stretching from where I took the shot. Nothing about this shot particularly screams "ultra wide angle" because I was careful with camera orientation to not get key-stoning and there aren't many diagonal leading lines that give that extreme perspective look. Basically it is just two "flat" subjects spaced from each other but the short focal allowed me to arrange the two planes such that the building fit in the gateway. There would be no way to take this shot with even a 14mm lens however.

So anyway, very, very specialized lens with not many use cases. Very hard to use, certainly for me and based on sample photos online hard for most people. I think a landscape shooter would be better served spending more time on the telephoto end of things than something this wide angle. The world is full of rather bad UWA landscape images and this kind of lens is going to usually just make that worse!

 

Thank you for a most insightful response, and for bringing other issues to my attention as well. I've never experienced a 'bad' lens... didn't know that shimming a lens was a thing, for example.

I have had a fantastic time with a 'cheap' 12mm FE... I would say I use it for about a third of the photos I take, and tend to put more effort into composition when using it, which can make it more fun (or more disappointing when it doesn't work out, which is also a kind of fun I guess).

It sounds like I would probably enjoy a RL, so long as I don't get a dud, since I am drawn to wide angle shots, and struggle to frame shots for 'defishing' with the fisheye. I will see what folks have to say about the 10mm 2.8 being offered by Laowa. I really enjoy night photography, and for stars alone the fisheye will always win, but I could imagine RL being favorable with the right foreground.

Well, now I'm sold.

 

If you are having fun with a fish-eye and using it a fair bit already then something like the Laowa 10/2.8 rectilinear would probably be a good fit for you. And doing astro the F/2.8 would be nice of course, but I guess the question is how sharp it is wide open.

If you aren’t in a rush it can sometimes be worth watching prices for a bit. Some of the Chinese lenses drop a good bit a little after introduction or they will have sales a few times a year. Not always though!

Tolerances for some lens designs are very tight. If you look closely at any lens at high resolution you will always find some asymmetry in sharpness across the field, that’s normal. But occasionally you run across one that is quite bad - and it happens with every manufacturer to a degree. For most lens designs it is a rare occurrence, but for some reason some can be notorious for having a high rate of “bad copies” with optical issues.

How much of an issue it is really depends on the use as well. So a 135/2 used for portraiture typically can tolerate some field tilt since the edges and corners are going to be out of focus anyway. And for landscape use some tilt wouldn’t matter much since you’ll be stopped down to at least F/8. But the very same lens in the hands of an astrophotographer isn’t going to cut it. They shoot wide open and want sharp stars corner to corner.

Not surprisingly it is the astro folks who are most likely to shim a lens mount then. Often the tolerances in just the lens body and mount aren’t tight enough to get a corner to corner flat field at F/1.4 on a 45MP sensor. So they’ll unscrew the mount on the lens and add shims to remove any tilt.

The problem I was having with the 9/5.6 lenses I was testing was they were having field tilt issues still pretty obvious at F/11! It wasn’t really the mount that was the issue though, some internal lens element was causing the field tilt I think but shimming the mount was a work around that could improve things a fair bit.

Anywho, sounds like you are good candidate for these crazy wide lenses.

 

Can confirm, IT IS STILL THERE (as of about a month ago) and as precarious as it was.

The slot itself definitely flowed. You only have to bend down a little to walk in now. Nothing collapsed, just the stream bed is significantly lower now. Kind of surprised me given it doesn’t drain a very large area. But anyway, it is the same place it was before with minor changes.

Didn’t really expect to visit it, but was on my daughter’s “greatest hits” list still and so back we went again this spring.

 

Alright, like what the hell? He dropped this six years ago in 2018 and I didn't catch it at the time. I think at the time I just assumed that in an earlier post I had mentioned I rotated the tires on that visit and that's what he was referring to, but upon further review I never mentioned it in any post. He did literally see me in person rotating my tires in camp.

So apparently October 2021 was at least the second time we crossed paths and he didn't fess up at the time.

 

Admit it, you're just a rabid insatiable tire rotator!

 

Apologies for the oblique path crossings

 

Actually in this case the only reason I stumbled across it six years later is because I was double checking this thread to see if I had missed logging a tire rotation as I believe I’m well overdue!

I’m going to be lazy this time and have Discount Tire do it while I eat In & Out.

Lol! No apologies necessary as it is hilarious. Well played. But now I know what you look like, as well as the parts of the park you most typically haunt, so I’ll be on guard!

 

Mojave National Preserve - Part 2
November 2023

Realized I kind of dropped this trip report midway and forgot about it! Anyway, I'll split the last day into two posts so it doesn't get too photo heavy.

After spending the night in Vegas while a storm rolled through I got up quite early and headed back down to MNP to see what the clouds might be up to. They were up to quite a lot as it turned out, but during the mid-morning I took a nice long break at one of the better preserved mining sites in the preserve. I spent a good hour sitting on the porch and reading some books about the area while I had something like a mid-morning snack or early lunch. The temps were delightful.

I of course also spent some time wandering around the property which in the changing partly cloudy light presented a number of interesting subjects.

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Prior to this mid-morning break the clouds had put on a show in the early morning and I was hoping that might continue into the afternoon. But that's for the next post. However, in the interim as a slight teaser right near the mine I found one of the denizens of the Mojave hanging out in a Joshua Tree seemingly enjoying the unusual weather:

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