Desert Videos

My first real digital video was done in the Mojave (but it was lost long ago); I’ve done a bunch more since then. The California and Nevada deserts (and, lately, the broader Great Basin deserts as well) have always fascinated and strongly attracted me (probably for all the wrong reasons), and while I’ve been taking photos of them for decades, it wasn’t until cheap digital video came along that I started making videos out there to document what I saw and felt about the desert. Some of the videos here obviously reflect the strong ambivalence I feel about the way humans have settled the desert and left so much wreckage and junk lying around (there’s a reason someone once jokingly summed up my photography as “dead cars in the desert”), but I try not to beat people over the head with it. My views are a lot less black-and-white than most people assume (enough so that I get flak from all sides) — there’s definitely real beauty and attitudes to admire in the strange juxtapositions of humans and deserts, and I hope some of that comes through here every now and then. If you’ve ever watched the wonderful documentary “Darwin” about the small Californian High Desert town of Darwin (a place I’ve been to a bunch of times, just passing through), you might recognize the phenomenon…

  • Unnatural Landscapes 6: Desert Sunrise (Trona Road)

    Unnatural Landscapes 6: Desert Sunrise (Trona Road) — a video by Hamish Reid.

    A very smoky sunrise captured from above off the Trona Road on my way from Barstow to Trona way back in 2020. It took me years to get around to editing this footage up into a finished clip, but I’ve wanted to get the combination of soft early morning light (with the smoke from the bush fires in another part of the state making itself felt even here) and a badly scarred desert landscape criss-crossed by ATV and other tracks. As usual, Garry Manley’s soundtrack really helps make this clip work.

    Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 6: Desert Sunrise (Trona Road)

  • Unnatural Landscapes 5: Salt Flats

    Unnatural Landscapes 5: Salt Flats — a video by Hamish Reid

    Built from footage I took on a trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah early Spring, 2024, and continuing a fascination I have with vehicle tracks carved into desert landscapes. In this case those tracks are hard to miss (I wanted to call this video NASCAR Lines, but I thought no one would get it), but I very nearly did miss them due to the terrible weather while I was in the area (it snowed on me at least once a day, and rained about half the time, and the wind was fierce). I need to go back out there and do it properly again. This is also so far the only Unnatural Landscapes to use a soundtrack that isn’t by Garry Manley — instead, it’s an old fave of mine, John Adams’s China Gates (performed by Nicolas Hodges), which I’ve wanted to use for something like this for a long time. And no, the clip’s not done in monochrome (as is obvious towards the end); the Flats are just like that when the skies are unbrokenly grey and rainy…

    Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 5: Salt Flats

  • Unnatural Landscapes 4: Lakebed

    Unnatural Landscapes 4: Lakebed — a video by Hamish Reid.

    Another Unnatural Landscape, another Owens Valley fly-by… definitely a more languorous take on the subject than most of my jeremiads about the LADWP, but still intended to hit home (albeit softly). As with most Unnatural Landscapes, the soundtrack’s by Garry Manley (Tactics, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Maybe).

    Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 4: Lakebed

  • Unnatural Landscapes 2: Quarry

    Unnatural Landscapes 2: Quarry — a video by Hamish Reid.

    Number two in the Unnatural Landscapes series, a short overhead view of a quarry or open cut mine in a volcanic landscape done in California during 2025. As with most of the other videos in the series, the soundtrack’s by my friend Garry Manley (Tactics, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Maybe) in Sydney.

    Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 2: Quarry

  • Unnatural Landscapes 1: Lake

    Unnatural Landscapes 1: Lake — a video by Hamish Reid.

    The first in a new series, Unnatural Landscapes, which focuses on California and Nevada landscapes typically scarred by (or at least deeply affected by) human work. In this case, it’s my old favourite, Owens Lake (with the LADWP playing its usual role of walk-on villain) and some unusually difficult-to-decode artificial landforms. The wonderful soundtrack is a collaboration with Garry Manley (Tactics, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Maybe), an old friend of mine in Australia, who’s basically responsible for all the music in this and most of the rest of the current series. Yes, some of this footage has appeared before, but I wanted to reuse it in a different sort of (dreamier) setting — and with a very different soundtrack (thanks Garry!) — so here it is.

    Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 1: Lake

  • Train

    Train: a video by Hamish Reid.

    A Fly-By I made recently from a raw clip I actually took a few years ago (2020) in the Mojave desert. The soundtrack’s an excerpt from György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, performed by Cappella Amsterdam & Daniel Reuss (2008). The soundtrack’s supposed to give the whole thing an ethereal tinge as a counter to the more angular and rough surfaces, colours, and geometries of the train and its surroundings, but I could have gone the other way instead, and tried a much more Industrial track (from the usual suspects) before I settled on Lux Aeterna (one of my fave Ligeti pieces).

    Go to video page…: Train

  • Water Park (Post-Apocalyptic Version)

    Water Park, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    The derelict Rock-A-Hoola water park in the middle of the Mojave Desert, east of Barstow, California, 2020-2023, with a post-apocalyptic Industrial soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    This place has always fascinated me over the decades — it used to be an actual water park, big water slides and pools and all, right there next to Interstate 15 in the middle of the boiling hot, stone dry Mojave Desert, a little east of Barstow, California. I remember it being full of people… sometimes. Other times it was closed. It had a troubled history, and has been derelict continuously now for many years. Naturally it’s been heavily graffitied and there’s always someone strolling furtively around in the ruins taking photos (I’ve even seen self-consciously Punk fashion shoots there) or doing donuts on the broken concrete; it’s a real ruins porn magnet for more serious photographers. This is my contribution to the genre, done over a couple of years and a few of my own furtive run-and-gun sessions…

    Go to video page…: Water Park (Post-Apocalyptic Version)

  • Over Owens Lake

    Over Owens Lake, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    Owens Lake, California, 2024.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, Owens Lake in California’s Owens Valley was a large 100 square mile blue-water saline desert lake fed by mountain streams and rivers. Then Los Angeles’s thirst took over, and as part of the California Water Wars, by the 1930’s the Owens Valley had been bled dry to help feed Los Angeles’s relentless expansion (LA is about 175 miles to the south).

    As a result, Owens Lake was turned into a toxic dust bowl, with alkali dust storms blowing up from the dry lake bed. By 2013 it was the largest single source of dust pollution in the US. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has lately been forced by legal action to try to mitigate the worst effects of its hundred years of deliberate neglect. The LADWP’s attempts don’t appear to have a lot of effect, and have resulted in bizarre landscapes in and around the lake.

    I first saw what was left of Owens Lake in the late 1980’s, I think, when it was much worse than it is now — the LADWP mitigation efforts over the last few years have had some impact on air and ground quality, I guess — but even still, the current state of Owens Lake generally has to be seen to be believed. There’s really no lake left, just various expanses of flat dusty poisonous wasteland, with, to the LADWP’s tiny credit, pockets of green here and there where birds seem to be thriving in the (tiny) wetlands again (the restored bits are maybe 1% of the original lake’s area, I believe). I’ve long felt a stupidly burning desire to show the world (or Californians, at least) what the lake really looks like, to show a view that’s generally hidden from the public (you’re only allowed on a tiny, very closely-curated bit of the old lake nowadays; the rest if off-limits by order of the LADWP). So here’s my attempt to give you some idea what’s behind the wire fences and “Trespassing Prohibited” signs.

    This video was taken from above and shows the bizarre landscape that’s the result of the LADWP’s mitigation efforts — a bunch of things like sprinklers or ditches or weird little islands in shallow ponds of strangely-colored water, or matting, or small flooded areas. Everything you see in this video should be under water — a lot of (mostly blue) water.

    Soundtrack © Relay For Death; used by permission (despite YouTube’s stupid content ID flagging this as a copyright hit…).

    Go to video page…: Over Owens Lake

  • Promised Land

    Promised Land, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death.

    California, 2020.

    Promised Land probably comes closest to summarizing a lot of what I ambivalently feel about humans and the Californian deserts, and it does it to a gorgeous soundtrack by local Bay Area industrial ambient noise band (and personal friends) Relay For Death. It’s also my longest video, and was shot in a bunch of locations stretching from east of Amboy, CA, in the Mojave Desert, through the Trona area, to the northern bits of California’s Owens Valley during the Covid era. I spent a lot of time thinking very broadly about where I was going to shoot before I went out and just did it over a week or so of shooting, but (of course) I mostly ended up making it up as I went along, using all the bits of the Mojave and the Owens Valley, etc., I’ve grown so familiar with over the last several decades. I didn’t mean to make it this long when I started it, but there was a lot of footage that sort of flowed naturally together, and the soundtrack — Relay For Death’s “Intone The Morph Orb” — turned out to make the length just right.

    Soundtrack: Relay For Death, “Intone The Morph Orb”, © Relay For Death, 2019.

    Go to video page…: Promised Land

  • Drive-by: Yucca Forest

    Drive-by: Yucca Forest; video by Hamish Reid, soundtrack by Roxann Spikula.

    2016: deep in my fave Joshua tree forest (a forest I’ve been visiting for a couple of decades now), somewhere in Death Valley National Park.

    One of the few desert videos here that’s simply a celebration of the desert itself, in this case of a Joshua Tree (Yucca) forest in Death Valley National Park, a forest that’s a bit off the beaten track and that I try to visit every year. The video is made by the soundtrack, adapted from a piece by local musician (and friend) Roxann Spikula, who also drove my Subaru along the desert tracks here while I sat on top of it holding my iPhone taking the raw video footage with a little Ikan stabilizer (yes, it’s an iPhone video, and no, it wasn’t done with a drone).

    Austere musical Greenland meets warm spiky desert visuals.

    Go to video page…: Drive-by: Yucca Forest

  • Sleep (The Alabama Hills)

    Sleep (The Alabama Hills): a video by Hamish Reid.

    This 2016 video is what happens when you stroll around the Alabama Hills (near Lone Pine, California) with an iPhone shortly after having watched Picnic At Hanging Rock… somehow a nice friendly part of the world that I know so well is actually made to look a little sinister. Oh well.

    It started out as a test of my then-new little Ikan stabiliser for my iPhone; it was the first time I’d used the combination of iPhone and stabiliser, and the footage wasn’t really intended to be used for anything much, but here it is. The Ikan works a charm, if a little flakily at times, and the iPhone’s video is usually pretty reasonable, or at least acceptable (it’s a lot easier than using either my D800 or FS700 for video).

    What transformed this into a real video was using dark ambient noise band Relay For Death’s “Sleep” as the audio bed (with their permission, of course) — it put shape and shade to the previously-shapeless mass, and it all coalesced (congealed?) into what you see (or don’t see) here. That’s often the case with my videos — it’s the soundtrack that’s primary, that determines so much else about the pacing, the cutting, and the atmosphere. It wasn’t meant to be quite so claustrophobic and sinister, but I couldn’t help myself really, and, hell, it was just a test. A test that’s lived on well past its use-by date, but never mind — I still enjoy watching it, and people seem somewhat amused by the ending if they’re paying attention.

    Go to video page…: Sleep (The Alabama Hills)

  • Drive-By: Desert

    Drive-By: Desert, a video by Hamish Reid.

    May 2011: A week in the Mojave Desert: Barstow, Bishop, Daggett, Trona, Bristol Lake, Ludlow, Tehachapi, Amboy, Keeler… the usual suspects.

    My first real attempt to make a video about human settlement and the Mojave, and also to capture some of the feeling of driving through the desert — the desert as it really is (and as I’ve known it in passing for decades now), not the pristine desert of the imagination or tourist brochures.

    I wanted to do this video for years — all the sometimes bizarre and unsettling forms of human settlement in the Californian deserts (a topic I’ve touched on obliquely using still photos elsewhere) as seen from a car driving (very slowly) past it all. All those places I’ve been familiar with for years — Barstow, Baker, Ludlow, Dagget, Trona, Mojave, etc. — I wanted to show their strangeness, their steely toughness, their vulnerability, their shiny decrepitude. You know, Pretentious (or, perhaps, Portentous) Art School Motives variant number 7a (there’s a lot of this around). Except I’m no artist, and never went to art school (I’m an engineer by training and profession).

    I had the overall architecture of the video in my mind for a long time, and by about 2010 the technology to do it became affordable for people like me. And so I went out and did it, over a long trip into the desert, using a variety of DSLR and other video cameras hanging off my Subaru using jerry-built mounts that only just kept the cameras from smashing to the ground on the rougher roads (it’s essentially an earlier version of the setup I used for Drive-By: Oilfield). I kinda like the end result — and it’s pretty close to what I’d envisioned all those years ago — but it’s really showing its age.

    It’s backed by Mahler’s Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (from his Das Lied Von Der Erde); I get criticized a lot for that soundtrack, but that soundtrack was in my mind from the start of the project: what better accompaniment to desert decrepitude and the American West’s endless struggle with entropy than a deliriously-overripe piece of Western Art Music? (Song Of The Earth is actually one of my all-time fave vocal music pieces, but never mind, it’s also over-the-top in ways that just cry out for a little snark — “Dark is life, dark is death!”, indeed). It also happened to be pretty much exactly the right length for the video, and had the right dynamics in the right places. It turned out to be easy to edit to as-is, which is unusual. And it’s not too encumbered with YT-based copyright issues, so there it is.

    I’m really tempted to do an updated scenic 5K version in the next year or two…

    Go to video page…: Drive-By: Desert