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.

I was in South Carolina for two weeks in March, visiting my family in North Charleston. One day I persuaded my dad (Hi, Dad! More photos from my trip soon, I promise!) to take me to the Francis Beidler National Forest. It’s an old-growth swamp forest in the South Carolina low-country with thousand-year-old cypress trees, and it’s quiet. Very quiet. It’s also beautiful. Check out the photos from that walk below.

My dad told me a story of coming to the Beidler Forest after jury duty in a nearby town. A rainstorm caught him as he was out on the boardwalk, and he took shelter on a bench under the lookout deck. Pretty soon he fell asleep, soothed by the sound of the rain on the water and the peace and emptiness. He said that he woke up quite refreshed from this unexpected nap. His story reminded me of all the rainy afternoons this winter when I hung out at Neary Lagoon in Santa Cruz, happy to have the place to myself. There’s something so calming about swamps and lagoons, especially when the rain drives everyone else away.

You can click here to learn more about the Beidler forest (opens in a new window).

Sometimes there’s a very special sort of magic that happens when things don’t turn out as expected. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to embrace this as a necessary part of life, rather than doing everything in my power to force things back on track. Sometimes, no amount of salt thrown over the shoulder or “get thee behind me, Satan/Murphy’s Law” will make things turn out the way you originally planned. The trick is to turn it to your advantage. The old saw is “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” BORING. Screw the lemons. I like oranges. Let’s make tiramisu soaked with Grand Marnier!

I mention this because the Red Bats had a bit of an unexpected adventure a few weeks ago. There was some business that needed to be taken care of up in Sacramento, which is about a 3 hour drive from lovely Santa Cruz. We had the day all planned – a bracing breakfast followed by a nice drive set to a soundtrack of bluegrass and This American Life podcasts. It went perfectly. Right up until the point where we encountered the Toll Booth. I put that in caps to indicate a certain ominousness. Foreboding, if you will. Imagine dark clouds gathering above the booth, lightning flickering over the craggy visage of the Mad Toll Collector inhabiting the booth like a troll, collecting fees from the endless line of goats passing over his bridge.

Needless to say, we didn’t have four bucks on us to pay the toll, so we pulled off the road and entered the lovely town of Martinez, hoping to find an ATM. We did not find one. We drove around a bit. We checked the GPS in my car. We drove around a bit more.

Finally, having captured no leprechauns, finding no ATMS, and having failed to stumble upon a Reverse PanHandler (he gives you money if you let him yell at you), we decided to call it a day and see what Martinez had to offer. Quite a lot, as it turns out! We wandered around town, found a train station, a marina, several interesting shops, and an excellent Thai restaurant with a waiter who thought we were in a band because we “look artistic”.

We passed the new camera phone back and forth throughout our journey, each of us taking 5 shots at a time. Here’s a bit of what we saw:

When we first began our wanderings in Martinez that day, Rebecca remarked that this town, though she couldn’t say why, felt like the sort of place a person might happen upon and decide to stay in for the rest of their lives. “It just has that vibe,” she said.

To our surprise, we found a monument of sorts to someone who’d done just that in a rather spectacular fashion. Built in 1900, the Forester was the last intact schooner on the west coast. It was 250 feet long, 32 feet wide, and weighed 680 tons. In the salty halcyon days of its youth, it set a world record for sailing from San Francisco to Australia in a mere 75 days. But in 1935, the owner of the Forester found Martinez, decided to spend the rest of his life there, and beached his ship on the mudflats. It sat there until 1975, when it burned to the waterline. Here it is, presented in Authentic Red Bat SepiaTone(TM):

Martinez seems to have it all – beautiful vistas, the calming chaos of the ocean and a feeling of welcome for souls like us. (There are also oil refineries, but we’re looking on the bright side, remember?)

Hi there Red Bat fans! Patrick here. For today’s blog post, I thought we’d move things out of the U.S. and get into the world at large. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling over the last few years, and I’ve got something of a back catalogue of landscapes and urban photography from different countries.

The inspiration for this was that while cleaning out my closet recently (in an attempt to de-clutter my life), I found an old pair of boots…boots with stories to tell. They carried me through South Korea, Japan, England, Scotland, Canada and a ton of places here in the U.S. They’ve passed over a lot of ground in many different parts of this world, and I had my camera with me every step of the way.

The first installment of Places My Boots Have Been is the first trip I took out of the country (save for an ill-advised trip to Mexico of which we will not speak). My best friend since high school now lives in South Korea, and I visited her in September of 2005. We had many adventures in Seoul, then skipped over to Tokyo and had some more there.

Before I get to the photos, I should tell you about one of the more amusing things that happened to me in Seoul, as it directly involves my boots. First of all, I don’t speak Korean. Let’s just get that out there at the start. Second, my friend Sora had to work while I was there, so I had some free time to explore the city. Third (and most importantly), I made an enormous miscalculation about the bus system in Seoul. I assumed that I could get on a particular bus (the blue 273 line), and I’d get a nice little round-trip tour of Seoul. So I packed my backpack with about 25 pounds-worth of gear, including a 17″ PowerBook, my Canon 10D with 24-70mm 2.8L lens, and a few other sundries. I thought maybe I could stop by some of the more historical areas scattered throughout Seoul, snap some photos, and do a bit of post-processing over a Frappucino at Starbucks. Yes, there are plenty of Starbucks in Seoul. Strangely, their Venti is our Grande. Everything really IS bigger in America.

Anyway. There I was, on the bus. It was maybe 9am. I had a bus pass loaded with enough money to get me to the end of the line, which I assumed would be a loop. Unfortunately, it really WAS a line. I started to get a little nervous when I noticed the city starting to thin out and get a little mountainous, but I assumed we’d start heading back soon. The next thing I knew, I was the last person on the bus, it was pulling into a dusty depot, and the driver was politely gesturing that I should exit the bus as soon as possible.

And that’s when my REAL Seoul adventure began. I was somewhere on the edge of the city – I didn’t know where. It was about 90 degrees and humid. I had no money with me. I had nothing to drink. I could not use my Visa card at any of the ATMs. I had no phone. I didn’t speak the language, so I couldn’t ask someone for money to call a phone number that I didn’t have, and I couldn’t ask someone for directions (or a ride) to an address I didn’t have. It was noon. I was supposed to meet my friend back at her apartment at about 3 or 4.

So I started walking.

I walked, and I walked, and I walked. I’ve never walked so far in my life, and it wasn’t just walking. It was a very fraught sort of walking. The only method I had for determining how to get back home was to rely on my memory of landmarks and bus colors. These were things glimpsed from a moving vehicle going in the opposite direction, and I frequently wasn’t paying particularly close attention. I didn’t have a map, and I only knew two bus stop numbers – the one in my friend’s neighborhood and the one of the place where I wanted to take pictures.

I made numerous wrong turns, but when a place didn’t seem “familiar” to me, I’d backtrack and start again. I was in a constant state of sustained heart attack coupled with vast injections of fear-based adrenaline, as I honestly had NO IDEA if I would be able to get back to the apartment using my notoriously poor memory, or if I was going to end up in the wrong neighborhood, in the wrong end of an alley and at the wrong end of something stabby.

So I just kept on walking.

SEVEN HOURS LATER, I noticed some things that were much more familiar to me, having seen them on previous walks through my friend’s neighborhood. I’d actually made it! The relief I felt at that moment has not been matched before or since. My friend was very angry at me for making her worry so much, and flabbergasted that I’d managed to make it back without assistance. I think she was about to call the police and start putting up posters. I seem to recall drinking about four gallons of water and sleeping very well that night.

We just recently figured out exactly how far I’d gone, so I took the liberty of putting together a map for your viewing pleasure. My friend’s apartment was in the bottom left, and the bus took me to the top right.

I didn’t stop to take any photos along the way, because a) I was trying to get back as quickly as possible, and b) I was concentrating pretty intently the whole time, because I didn’t want to lose the very thin thread I was so desperately clinging to. I DID take plenty of photos at almost every other moment during that trip, and here they are without any further ado:

Click here for the slideshow!