Route 66 gallery uploads

Infamous “Blue Whale”

I have finally finished going through the digital files from our road trip and I have edited, selected and uploaded the images to their state folders that I found to be the most successful. I came to the realization that it would be unrealistic and would probably take an extraordinarily long time to do each state one at a time. I also, unfortunately, vastly overestimated the amount of free time I would have in my darkroom to develop the negatives and print the images from my 35mm film. I have some great images to work with so far and am excited to continue working on them and uploading them as soon as possible.

One of my favorites. Micah doing what he loves and my happy little girl.

It’s been a joy going through all of the images and seeing the ones that really captured the moments and destinations during this extraordinary adventure the three of us found ourselves on. It cannot be overstated how amazing it was.

We were worried about how Ella would handle being on the road for so long. We had never been anywhere that wasn’t simply Point A to Point B. Turns out, we couldn’t have asked for a better passenger! She had such an amazing time. Every morning she would wake up and excitedly say, “Next hotel!,” and enthusiastically help pack things up to get back on the road. I recall maybe once where she got upset while in the car. Otherwise, she watched out the window and just enjoyed watching everything go by. I have one more week of vacation left this year and she’s already repeating, “Next road trip is in summer!,” over and over.

We each had things to stop and do throughout the trip(Micah did all the planning) so we wouldn’t be cooped up for too long in the car. Micah had many parks, sanctuaries and hiking trails to do his birding. He had a lot of fun finding species that we don’t get to see up here in the Midwest. Unfortunately, it was too early to see any condors at the Grand Canyon and the roadrunner eluded us the entire trip.

We stopped at an aquarium in Missouri for Ella as well as an amazing interactive art installation in New Mexico called Meow Wolf. This place is a wild and bizarre exhibit that if anyone is able to get the time to experience it, I highly recommend it! I think that this was the highlight for Ella on the trip. This was also something that we were on the fence about as we were worried it might be too much of a sensory overload for her. But she really enjoyed getting to play with all the different installations. Eventually it did get to be a little to over stimulating for her and we had to make a dash to the finish line. One could spend an entire day there and still not be able to absorb it all.

Abandoned building in New Mexico

As for me, well, we stopped at the cliche ghost towns and cliche abandoned buildings so I could take cliche photographs. However, I love this kind of photography and always have and really, the only thing that matters as a creative is to do what you enjoy doing. When you begin to create art just for the sake of what others may think, it becomes something else entirely and really ceases to be a representation of your vision and your art. I’ve never really cared about “likes” on social media etc. Probably why it has taken me decades to put up a website…

Truthfully though, for me this trip was mostly all about the trip itself. Taking the time to get away from it all and to simply focus on my family and being present in the moment. Being able to use my passion of photography to document the journey was really a bonus. The amount of healing this trip did for me emotionally and mentally can also not be overstated. I mean, what an amazing opportunity to see and do so many fantastic things! A true, old school American family road trip. Pardon the pun but, what a ride!

I am trying to problem solve why some of my images are uploading in poor resolution and others are not. All the images are optimized for the web so it’s frustrating. Hopefully I can find out what the issue is and get it figured out. So, if some of my images on this website look kind of crappy I apologize.

As stated on the main page, this will continue to be a living gallery and I will be adding more images from time to time. Most obviously the analogue images from my darkroom though I am sure I will find more digital images as well that I may have overlooked. Kind of started to get overwhelmed toward the end of some of those larger folders on my hard drive.

I will always post blog updates whenever I upload images to any of my galleries on the site so that anyone taking the time to view them will know when to come take a look.

In the mean time, you can follow the link here to go to the main Route 66 page and look through the galleries. I really hope you do enjoy seeing the images!

~Cory