American Road Trip 1979 on Kodachrome

#USA22-11 Rapid City, South Dakota, 31 May 1979
St Joseph St from intersection of Mt Rushmore Rd

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#USA22-06 Pronghorn/American Antelope, South Dakota prairie, 31 May 1979

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truly an extraordinary image. It captures the vastness of the American Prairie.

Another of those rare moments in one's life. The antelope could not have been in a better place at the time. As if posing and waiting for you to click the camera shutter...
 
truly an extraordinary image. It captures the vastness of the American Prairie.

Another of those rare moments in one's life. The antelope could not have been in a better place at the time. As if posing and waiting for you to click the camera shutter...
thanks! It was through the van window while driving - one of those lucky moments
 
#USA22-32 Iron Mountain Road and Mt Rushmore, SD, 31 May 1979
Tunnel view. BW conversion in LR6.
We passed Bison in this area but photos from the moving van had too much motion blur.

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Best view I've seen of The Four Faces.

It made me wonder, if Trump gets re-elected, will he have himself carved in as the fifth? Just a random thought, but with that one anything is possible.

Alas, I did not make it to the Dakotas in '79, so I missed out on this. In '82 I was on a working sabbatical as a ('relieving' reporter-editor for one of the major news syndicate) in the USA, and while I did end up in Wyoming for a couple of weeks, I never did make it to Rushmore or Custer. My loss.

For most of the '82 trip I had only one Nikkormat and a '50/2.0, not the best lens for traveling landscapes. That year I shot mostly B&W as I found I wasn't in any one location long enough to have my Kodachrome films processed and the slides returned to me. A bad experience with several boxes of slides gone missing in the post, soured me on using the US mail system, altho' oddly those slides turned up two years later at the home of my friends in New Mexico, so I did get them back.

Film photography was a world all its own in the 1970s and 1980s. There was the expectation of waiting for one's films to be returned, also the 'frisson' from wondering if images taken in one place were good or not. I didn't travel as fast or as widely as you did, Lynn, but even so I rarely had the possibility of going back to a place I'd already been to, and reshooting, except in New Mexico, where I had the luxury of being able to roam thru the entire site at leisure thanks in my own car, that Maverick, wreck as it was, got me everywhere I wanted to go with the added plus of being able to carry everything I owned with me. At one point I even had a Beseler 4x5 enlarger in the boot (dismantled and in pieces of course), which I had acquired free from friends in Arizona. Common sense ultimately set in and I gave it away to new friends in South Carolina. One lives and learns...

Beautiful images. From a seemingly endless supply. Amazing how so many good landscapes can be taken haphazardly from a moving car, but as I've always thought, it's more about the photographer than the camera.
 
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