rebecca barnes photography

Come live with me and be my love/ And we will all the pleasures prove/ That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields/ Woods, or steepy mountain yields...

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In the wee hours of August 19, I left San Francisco on a plane headed for Taipei...

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This was my chance to examine up close the kind of granite that makes up the canyon cliffs. It was light-colored with dark specks, some of which were quite large...

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The day went like this: pick up an object, dust it, place it in the best light, photograph it from all angles. Then repeat with the next object. Sometimes I swerved my lens in the direction of some blossom or bud...

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From the passenger seat I gazed down at the coastline we’d just traveled, feeling like I was on the edge of a precipice. It seemed impossible to have gotten so far above the highway in such a short time...

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Plants, rocks and fences lay half-buried. In some places our feet sank deep, and it took effort to free them, as if gravity had suddenly grown stronger...

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Beneath the hoodoos, and all around these colorful limestone wonders, reddish debris showed the eventual fate of all of these landforms: to crumble into dust....

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An ocean retreated and a desert formed, a desert that may have been the largest to ever exist on Earth. These blocks of stone were once sand dunes, I kept thinking in amazement, finding it impossible to picture that transformation...

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The unusual shapes and colors were only part of the strangeness; there was also the sudden appearance of red here in the middle of a mostly dull-colored terrain...

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There's something innocent and alien about these glossy yellow creatures. Watching them move in the forest that day, their eyestalks a-waving in the occasional beams of light... 

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Leonard thought that if people could just see those words in huge letters, they would immediately grasp the simplicity of salvation. Unfortunately for him, his hot air balloon plan never worked out... 

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Many of my favorite photos by the sea have been taken at twilight, when time stops for a moment and the air shimmers in the sudden absence of sunshine. That pause always seems full of secrets, invisible spirit world doings...

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Coming out of the woods into that field in late afternoon was a glorious, sun-drenched moment of transcendental bliss. We stopped at an information kiosk that displayed otter and sea lion pelts and other objects of interest, but I didn't care... 

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Then we reached a fork in our trail and took a wrong turn. For a while we were lost. We spent a surreal hour looking at a map under the weird moonlight gleam and backtracking to several faintly remembered points...

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If you are starting to get the idea that lichens are a complicated and mysterious subject, you're right. Biologists didn't even recognize them as symbiotic organisms for a long time...

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Why would I speedwalk when I had all day to take pictures here, and nobody with me to sigh and look bored while I spent half an hour photographing a tangled clump of kelp? 

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It's home to plants, insects, and the extremely rare Badwater snail, which can only be found in a few pools in Death Valley. Sucked up from an underground aquifer by the faultline at the base of the mountains, this water...

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At home with the parents, it's too easy to live in a kind of fugue state, wrapped in a blanket of those emotions you always feel around those people and those familiar objects. Sometimes this fugue state is a necessity, a matter of survival...

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From the moment we left my house in Santa Cruz until the moment when we returned, whenever I wasn’t sleeping, I was taking pictures. Inside our moving vehicle, I dashed about wildly, shooting in every direction...

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As we made our way to Joshua Tree, the transformation was complete. The photography robot had become the unconscious brute force in the situation. The thinker went along for the ride, gleefully shouting observations inside my skull...