American Road Trip 1979 on Kodachrome

[lynnb]

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

 

[lynnb]

Pronghorn/American Antelope.

thanks Vince. Post amended.

 

[Vince Lupo]

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

Interesting if you look at a Google Maps street view from today it looks pretty much the same.

 

[Freakscene]

Indeed,

Interesting if you look at a Google Maps street view from today it looks pretty much the same.

Indeed, except Rapid City, like all other places, now lacks 1970s automobiles.

 

[DownUnder]

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

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...

 

[lynnb]

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

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-14 road to Keystone/Mt Rushmore, South Dakota, 31 May 1979

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-15 Keystone, South Dakota, 31 May 1979

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-16 road to Mt Rushmore, South Dakota, 31 May 1979
This is how it appears in the transparency. I remember it looked like this and I snapped a picture while driving by,

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-17 Mt Rushmore, South Dakota, 31 May 1979

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-18 Mt Rushmore, South Dakota, 31 May 1979
Taken with the Nikkor 105mm f/2.5

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-26 Pigtail Bridges, Custer State Park, SD, 31 May 1979

 

[lynnb]

#USA22-28 Pigtail Bridges, Iron Mountain Road, Custer State Park, SD, 31 May 1979

 

[lynnb]

#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.

 

[lynnb]

#USA23-01 Custer, South Dakota, 31 May 1979
I'm not certain this is Custer. Our route went from Iron Mountain Rd to Devil's Tower Wyoming via Custer and Sundance. Note the sign for a Photo Studio on the right.
Light leak at start of roll.

 

[lynnb]

#USA23-03 storm clouds, South Dakota-Wyoming area, 31 May 1979
Heading towards Devil's Tower, Wyoming

 

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Whenever I traveled to these places I always wondered what the first settlers felt when they saw these vistas as they traveled west.

 

[DownUnder]

#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.

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.

 

[lynnb]

#USA23-04 Wyoming, 31 May 1979
Heading towards Devil's Tower, Wyoming. From the road.

 

[lynnb]

#USA23-05 Wyoming, 31 May 1979
Heading towards Devil's Tower, Wyoming. From the road.