An abandoned building I found on Route 66 en route to Sedona.
When the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta came to an end, we moved on in the direction of Sedona, Arizona. That area is just beautiful and Karen had never been there. I also needed to be close to an airport so I could fly out to teach two "From Focus to Finished" seminars, and the Flagstaff airport was convenient.
I love all the vintage signs I run across when traveling on Route 66. I also like using my tilt-shift lens to force additional perspective into the image, which is the exact opposite of what most people use the lens for.
Instead of taking the highway, which would have been the fast route to Sedona, we followed historic Route 66 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff. It took us a couple days to get there because of all the photo stops. Some of my favorite things to shoot are vintage and abandoned America, so Route 66 is a haven for me, and I've driven the entirety of it more than once.
The owner of this building on Route 66 was nice enough to let me shoot for a bit
One of the interesting things about Route 66 is that it's always changing. Many of the sights I saw and photographed this past week were very different from how they looked the first time I drove "the Mother Road." Either a place becomes abandoned and slowly decays leaving a shell of shapes and textures, or a place is restored … revived with new paint and a better reflection of how it looked in its prime. We made a lot of stops in the course of a few days, and I filled a lot of memory card space!
A shot of a fun cafe in Holbrook, AZ
When we arrived in the Sedona area, we started to make up for a lot of work time that was spent shooting on the road. I also had a slew of packages waiting for me at our RV park. I mentioned before that I just upgraded my computer to a beefier MacbookPro. The packages contained the parts I ordered to further trick out my new Mac. These included a solid state hard drive, another internal hard drive with more storage, and 16 gig of RAM. As if that weren't enough, I added a nice new Focal XS speaker system to top it off.
I'm installing the drives I got for my new MacbookPro!
We'll spend a bit of time exploring the Sedona area, and then we'll head back to Vegas. That's where we will park the bus while we fly out to a South African Safari! More to come..