A desert lilly juxtaposed with one of Ricardo Breceda's metal sculptures.
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Desert flower macros on black
Photographed with a macro lens, tiny desert floor flowers reveal intricate, hairy detail. These photos were taken as focus stacks in shaded daylight, with a black cloth positioned as a backdrop. Using the black level and shadows sliders in Photoshop I could then render the background as a perfect black, without affecting the exposure for the plants.
Carrizo Plain 2023
Following a succession of drenching winter ‘atmospheric river’ storms, online predictions were for an exceptional superbloom this spring. Anne and I first travelled out to Carrizo Plain near the end of March, which had been near the peak of the spectacular blooming seasons in 2017 and 2019. But this year the flowers were much delayed. Temperatures had remained cold into springtime - well below freezing at our usual campsite in the Caliente Mountains - and there was little color to be found. A second visit a week later also proved to be too early, though yellows of hillside daisies and purple phalacia were appearing on the mountains at the northern end of the plain along highway 58.
On our final visit on April 22nd everything had changed; a true superbloom was probably near its peak. Most spectacularly, the slopes of the Temblor Range stretched as an artist’s palette of yellow, orange, blue and purple for over 30 miles bordering the Elkhorn plain. Although individual areas had been as vivid in 2017 and 2019, I had never seen the entire range carpeted so uniformly. Flowers were everywhere; but so were visitors, attracted to this usually remote region by news articles reporting that the flowers could be seen from space. Not at all a quiet and serene experience along the main Soda Lake road, so we escaped to find solitude by driving up the rugged 4wd trail leading up to the southern end of the Temblors. Once on the switchback ridge we encountered only one other vehicle and gained expansive views down the canyons dropping on each side. Indeed, we were privileged to find fields of flowers at least as vivid as those down in the plains, but would be seen by only a handful among the tens of thousands of visitors to the more accessible parts of the Monument. Our 15 year old Xterra with 250k miles on it proved again an enduring resource for exploration and photography!
Most of the photos below come from our final visit, with some close-up shots and photos in more atmospheric weather conditions from the earlier two visits.
Photos from our third visit - when it really was a superbloom
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The photos below are from our first (March 25,26) and second (April 2,3) visits. There was nice color at the northern end of the Temblors, along highway 58 (which was closed at that time following landslides). Otherwise the mountains were largely bare, but there were individual and small groups of flowers to do macro photography.
Carrizo Plain 2019
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 Water tank high in a Temblor canyon : Carrizo Plain |
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Purple panorama at the southern end of the Elkhorn Plain : Carrizo Plain |
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Anza Borrego 2019
 Carpets of desert gold; Death Valley, near the junction with the Harry Wade exit road. 3/12/2005 |
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updated 04/01/2024
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