Life Is A Road Trip

The Amazing Adventures of a Zoobroker and a Sentiographer

on the road

Elko Nightlife

nevada, on the road, SpamZalotMatt Hill3 Comments

Zoo and I ate a family-style dinner at the Basque restaurant BilToKi. It was amazing. Very farm-style food. Started with a tomato/onion/cabbage soup, some awesome bread, then a trio of sides: Beans, Steamed (soft) veggies and some pasta with red sauce. Then came the meat (sorry for the quality - it's a phone):

A perfect, giant-sized pair of filet mignon, and high-heat seared-to-perfection pork chops. And fries on the side. Needless to say, neither of us cleaned out plates. Holy bloat. So, we headed back to the hotel to ride out the food coma and blog.

Apparently, Elko has the highest concentration of Basque in America. Thank you! Dinner was outstanding.

Wednesday night in Elko is neither dead nor hopping. At the suggestion of the gal behind the counter at our hotel, we headed over to G's for some drinks. What was that noise as we approached? Karaoke. You know it! We had a few brews, sang some songs and enjoyed getting to know the locals better. Friendly people, but kinda stuck... Stuck in circumstances, stuck in beliefs that they will never escape.

Take the glitz and glam on Las Vegas, mix in a rodeo, the Basque, some mexicans and Native Americans (lots of mix blood around here) and you get a really interesting cross-section of cowboy gambling drinking farmer young stuck in the town feeling. Kind of desperate, but resigned. It's charming if you like gritty (and I do), but as I mentioned in my night shots post, it had a slight edge of danger because a few people had a chip on their shoulder for out of towners.

We popped out heads into three brothels, just to see what it was like. Zoo Broker will be going to Amsterdam shortly.

Now we head off to... (to be posted)

The Most Amazing Road on Earth

idaho, nevada, on the road, photography, SpamZalotMatt Hill1 Comment

When Zoo and I headed out on our 1st road trip from LA to Denver, we made on little side trip in Arizona. We cut north of the mountains to get to Sedona and ended up in Jerome - high up on the rim of the mountains surrounding the area. It started with a cattle gate and ended during dusk. It was a moving experience and I exclaimed THAT was the best road I had ever been on. Scratch that. (It was and still is amazing...) Today, we took a side road that cut through Humboldt National Forest. It starts in southern Idaho and ends 40'ish miles north of Elko, NV. It changed my life, and we guess that no more than 10,000 people have ever seen what we saw today.

Gobs of photos after the jump.  First we drove past the Salmon River Reservoir: 

and on into the Bruneau Desert flats

And then into a jaw-dropping canyon. And I mean CANYON. 

Zoo took a moment to throw a stone...

And then, since I was driving this leg, into the base of the canyon. We drove along at 20 mph, wondering how far it really was to Jarbidge, because we were nearing a half tank of gas... Nothing like a little uncertainty to make you enjoy things more ;)

So we stopped and shot up into the canyon walls a few times. Zoo said, "Fuck Arches! [National Park) And fuck the tourists! This is awesome." I soooo agree.

After stopping for lunch and gas (what a relief) in Jarbidge (see post) Zoo took the wheel and we drove higher and higher...

When I dreamed of road tripping this time of year, I saw in my mind's eye the aspen and birches turning yellow... and I got it. Stunning.

And the landscape changed for the third time. Now the mountains were carpeted with scattered trees.

And then the landscape changed yet again, now getting into desert-like conditions with jutting rocks on mountainsides here and there...

And then Hunboldt ended.

The desert became even more desert-like. The mountains squashed down into hills.

We were on private land, and cattle ranches surrounded us... but not much cattle.

 

And then 5 1/2 hours later, we hit pavement again. Did I mention that it was 95% dirt roads? Yeah, that's a road trip! 

Dirty Hyundai. Love ya!

See the whole trip as time-lapse

Sometimes a road trip is just a road trip ...

musings, on the road, SpamZalot, Zoobrokerzoobroker1 Comment

... but folks, have you checked out the pictures that Spamzalot has taken? Every day this man produces something astounding. "Produced Something Astounding".

Not bad words for my tombstone, now if I could only get someone to say it about me! For sure, this is a wake-up call. This morning I contrasted Spammer's ACTUAL art production to my own. I said: "People are my canvas" .. which conjures up a better catch phrase: "The Audience Is the Canvas". Good catch phrase, even though it's MEANINGLESS.

For fuck's sake, what I do, although not lacking in skill or imagination, is NOT art. I gotta get on it.

Time Lapse on the Road

on the road, technologyMatt Hill1 Comment

Fictitious people have not asked us how we make the time-lapse movies of our driving time. Well, since you didn’t ask – we’ll share! (OK, really, the folks we’ve met while on our travels have seen them and they did ask...) Day 1: Nikon D700 with MC-32 MC-36 (thanks, Gabe!) Remote Release set to 0:18 second intervals and jpg quality. I set up the tripod in the back seat and zoomed out to 120mm to shoot through our windshield. Fortunately, this was also the day we willed nealry 8,000 inects with the Hyundai.

Back in the hotel after dinner, I imported them into iStopMotion in NTSC space (could have gone HD... but naw) at 4 frames per second. Export, upload to Vimeo and share!

Day 2: Somewhere along the way, we realized the JPG quality was set to large – not necessary. Made the import the night before much too long. So, now set to the smallest jpg, we could record 7,500 image if we wanted. What do we do? Increase the frequency, of course. So, at an interval of 0:05 seconds, we captured throughout the day... Until both batteries on the D700 died (I forgot to turn off the one setting on the body that told it not to engage the autofocus – the lens was on manual focus). Canon G9 to the rescue! Popped that bad boy on a tripod in front of me in the front seat on Time lapse movie mode and 1 second intervals and that got us all the way into Rapid City.

Processing was interesting. Same deal as yesterday, but with 4,500 images from the Nikon – import and export at 15 frames a second this time. Now import this file into Final Cut Pro HD in NTSC space, plus the four movie clips form the Canon. Put ‘em all in the timeline, hit export and head out for some night shooting. Came back later, uploaded to Vimeo, let that process overnight (upload too 24 minutes), and embed here on the site this morning.

Day 3 (Today): Figured that it was far easier to record a movie file instead of thousands of little JPGs. So, we are running the G9 all day. First half battery ran out twice (forgot to charge it last night, and a 25 minute charge at lunch did not cut it). So we bought an AC 100V invertors and ran the Nikon again in the middle fo the day on 0:10 second intervals, and now back to the Canon at 2 second intervals.

We’re rolling through Sheridan, Wyoming right now on Interstate 90 and I’m typing this up so we can have more fun time tonight instead of blogging time. :) What a beautiful Sunset.

--SpamzZalot

6:21 PM mountain time