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).