Have we told you about our magazine covers? We haven’t? Well, we shall have to rectify that! To date, our photos have appeared on the covers of TWO magazines. Yes, that’s right – TWO, which is two more than zero.

The first cover was the summer 2008 issue of Slow Food USA’s The Snail. Here’s the cover:

Ours is the sheep photo, not the fish thing.

The second cover is out now, and it’s the Spring 2009 issue of Mystery Scene, starring Laurie King:

That’s simply a screenshot from their website, but as you can see, the interview offers a bit of “Subversive Fun” with Laurie King. Intriguing! I also like how the “Y”s in their title font look a bit stabby.

Finally, I’m not sure if you’re all aware of this, but I’m kind of a big deal in Masonic Imposter circles:

I’m not sure what I’m doing with my hand there, but you can read more about faux Masons at the National Heritage Museum’s blog.

This is the time of year that I start thinking about Mammoth Lakes, California. Mammoth is a little ski town up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains about 60 miles from Yosemite National Park. My grandparents have had a little cabin there since the 70’s, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to go up there just about every year since then.

They’re getting a little older now, so I help them open the cabin in May or June, once the snow melts enough so we’re actually able to get at it. It’s a summer cabin, which means that in the winter it’s covered by up to 20 feet of snow. All of that snow is pretty heavy, so when we close the for the winter, we need to shutter the windows with inch-thick pine shutters to keep the windows from breaking, and we need to reinforce the roof with metal poles at strategic locations to keep the roof from caving in. We also need to do fun things like remove the chimney so it doesn’t get crushed and warped by the snow. And of course, opening it is the same thing in reverse, plus cleaning. And dusting. Lots and lots of dusting.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s a beautiful little cabin, and it’s worth the effort. It’s one of my favorite places on earth, and since the snow is starting to melt, I thought I’d share a little bit of it with you.

(The lake photos are of Mono Lake, and the structures are tufa).

These photos were taken on my flight from Dallas to San Francisco in March. A very nice lawyer was sitting next to me. I clicked away for a while before she said, “Your job looks a lot more fun than mine!” After watching her spend the flight using her highlighter on stacks of rather uninspiring material, I had to acknowledge that she spoke the truth. (Not that I get paid to take pictures from an airplane or anything, whereas I am certain her hours on that plane were billable.)

If someone were to pay me to take pictures from a plane, I hope they would provide me with a cleaner window than what I got that day. I’d be open to extra peanuts as well, and the whole can of apple juice instead of just the cup.

Not long ago, I traveled to Joshua Tree National Park and took thousands of pictures. But ever since I returned, I’ve been buried in wedding photos and unable to find time to contemplate all the marvels of the desert as captured by my camera. The life of a photographer is one continual effort to catch up.

Catching up often means working frantically to process photos I’ve just taken for a paying gig in order to gain time to process photos from a past non-paying adventure. Catching up usually means moving backwards in time. My sense of time has gotten quite wonky from living this way (and it was weird to begin with).

To add to the confusion, I’m not fully conscious of the details of what I’ve photographed until I look at the pictures later. At the moment the shutter clicks, I’m thinking about exposure, composition, the flow of events, the overall story of the subjects in front of me, the next direction the action is likely to take. It’s not until I am manipulating the photos on the computer screen, alone in a darkened room, that I see what was actually happening. It’s almost always different from what I thought was happening.

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with the photo below, which was taken on a dry lake bed near one of the entrances to Joshua Tree National Park. I suppose I’m trying to explain the feeling I get when I look at this photo and realize just how many bullet holes are in that rusty old refrigerator, and how much sand has built up inside and around it. I didn’t notice those things when I took the picture because I was too busy trying to properly expose the sky and compose the shot and plan my next ten shots and figure out if I’d have enough battery power left for a long sky exposure that night and who knows what else.

Not that it would’ve mattered whether or not I noticed the bullet holes at that moment. It would not have been an earth-shattering discovery; that refrigerator has obviously been there for quite some time, being shot at and collecting sand.

There’s something I’m trying to say here but it keeps eluding me; plus, I feel like maybe I’ve said it before. At moments like these, I’m ever so glad I can just show you a picture.