This is one of my additions to the “oh so very soon to be released” Utata “Big Summer” project called Nocturnal Photographer 2010. From the looks of things, it’s going to be an absolutely fantastic project. I would encourage anybody with nocturnal leanings to tag their work and participate (there’s still time-you have until midnight in your time zone tonight!) and, for the rest of you, I hope you will enjoy the link once it’s available. I’ll try to post it here sometime tomorrow, as soon as I get it myself.
For this project, there’s a bit more excitement because we don’t have a “hidden preview” (so not many of us know what it looks like yet either!) combined with the fact that the first night photographer project was such a sweeping success. You can imagine how excited we all are about this year’s project.
So far, I’ve completed three of the themes-I’ve done places, people, and lights. I am probably going to do interpretive before the night is over, but not totally sure about that one yet. We’ll see and, as they say, the night is still young! (Heck, it’s daylight where I live now.)
For the places theme, to give you a bit of a tease, I shot a Route 66 motel at night. I shot mostly the big neon sign (that you see here) and also around the pool area a lot. It was fun to do, though a bit quick as far as projects go. I did it over my recent trip to New Mexico.
Route 66 motels are sort of interesting subjects even without the night factor coolness. For those of you who don’t know, Route 66 is a class highway, one that originally ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. It’s known as the “Main Street of America” and also the “Mother of all highways” since it was one of the first interstate highways in the United States. The motels along Route 66 were famous for being friendly “mom and pop” style hotels, not the big chain motels we’re so used to seeing today. Catering to drivers passing through, many of the famed Route 66 motels are in odd locations, places like the wilds of New Mexico and deserted stretches of road in California. Sadly, many of these motels have been left to rot, torn down, “modernized” or done away with by some other horrible means of slow death, but they were an active part of the history of Route 66 and even a good chunk of Americana itself. If you can find one, they are fun places to visit and total throwbacks to that bygone era of summer vacations, road trips, and back country highways that’s now a bit out of place in modern times.
Look for a link to the big Utata project sometime early next week.
Until next time…
