Looking Back: April 2014 (Unprocessed Sunday)

In this post, I look back at April 2014 and some of the images I made a decade ago.This idea follows similar posts by friends and colleagues Alexander S. Kunz, and Bob Henry, who do this every month.  In the past, I have had some ambition to go through a voluminous Lightroom Catalog to find old images that haven’t been processed.  I have done that occasionally under the Unprocessed Sunday blog tag, but I have thousands and thousands of photographs that have not seen the light of day.

Another interesting thing to ponder is that for some months in this period, I could even look back twenty years.  I wish I was still twenty years old, but the reality is that photography has been with me for over half my life.  I have mixed feelings on this.  While there is a large catalog of my various adventures that are visually documented, over time I put aside many other hobbies and serious interested.  Here in April 2024, putting my camera down to sit down to write, draw, and mess around with other ideas, is something I give increasing thought to.  But we are focused here on April 2014, so we will go ahead and dive in.

First Image – Bacon!

My friends from back home where I grew up would come down a couple times per year to do what we called a Bacon Depravity Weekend.  The key to the weekend was the unholy consumption of pounds and pounds of bacon.  This runs the course from the cheapest stuff you could find in Walmart to the Rolls-Royce of Bacon from Nueske’s farm in Wisconsin.  I think we went through 20 pounds of bacon that weekend.  An unnamed friend make the mistake of Canadian Bacon.  He was made award this wasn’t real bacon.  All other bacon was consumed by Sunday.

Next Image – El Cajon Mountain

I made this photograph of El Cajon Mountain during a nice sunset on a Friday night.  This mountain, which dominates the view in East San Diego County, has long been a muse.  This was the best location to photograph the monolith I could find, and it remains the best to this day.  This isn’t a perfect image, for reasons I won’t draw attention to, but I know why this series sat in the vault for so long.  Still, it was a nice way to begin the evening and a weekend.

Next Images – Old Highway 395

Next Images – Muddy Mountain Wilderness

The next weekend, I was in Nevada’s Muddy Mountains Wilderness with my friend James.  That weekend, we had intended to be elsewhere in what is now Gold Butte National Monument, but that ended up being the weekend of the Bundy Standoff and they completely closed the area.  The Muddy Mountains were the consolation prize, but it ended up being a great weekend hiking with very few people around.  I realized in looking in my archives that I also photographed an incredible amount of rock art, that I will need to return to later.

These two images were taken Friday night, and after sunset on Saturday night, and I should have processed these so much sooner.

Next Image – A Lunar Eclipse

The lunar eclipse at totality was my April 2014 Photo of the Month, so another of the same wouldn’t make too much sense here.  But I also realized that I could process an image as the moon was entering Earth’s shadow.  I think this looks nice, actually.

Next Image – Round Mountain

The next weekend, I visited another beloved location, with a sunset at East County’s Round Mountain.  This section has a nice view of the abandoned Arizona Eastern San Diego Railway.  I have published an image of this afternoon previously, but I processed another one tonight just to compare my editing from 2014.  My 2014 version was decidedly “crunchy” and not a version I like too much.  I prefer much more careful and soft editing.

Final Images – East County

Neither of these images are spectacular, but they were good finds for the weekend I spent touring my friends around the neighborhood (while eating an obscene amount of bacon).  The first image was up near the top of Sheephead Mountain Road (not the peak of Sheephead Mountain itself) that overlooks the valley where Buckman Springs is located.  I have always loved studying, researching, and visiting old roads.  So that image was nice, as it shows the original Old Highway 80, original Buckman Springs Road, the new cutoff created when Interstate 8 was built, and the first stretch of Sheephead Mountain Road.

The second image is from our trip to the Pumpkin Patch.  At the time, this was my second visit, but we were coming in a different way.  An unnamed friend had saved directions on Google, taking cell phone coverage for granted.  You can guess how that went in 2014.  A second unnamed friend, driving, got pretty reckless driving way too fast worried we were going to miss sunrise.  Note the lack of cloud coverage – the stakes for a “nice sunrise” image were lower than we wanted to admit.  At one point, he hit a rough spot on the dirt road, and my cooler actually hit the ceiling of his cab.  We had to tell him to chill out.

That weekend, we also hit the Pine Valley offroad area, the mud caves in Anza-Borrego, and of course, the Wisteria Candy Cottage in Boulevard.

Until next time, here are 10 images I have managed to get out of the vault, looking over my April 2014.  I had better get my camera out soon, or I won’t have anything to cover in April 2034.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the images.

tmschultze

T.M. Schultze is a San Diego-based photographer, traveller, and writer. He writes, photographs, and draws things of the outdoors that have inspired humans for thousands of years. He co-authored the Photographer’s Guide to Joshua Tree Park which can be purchased here.