saturday, my friend carissa and i visited the armagosa opera house which is between death valley, ca and las vegas, nv. we found this pearl on our way to death valley two weeks before and both decided we needed to check out the opera house in the ghost town.

it was, as i expected, romantically creepy. it was everything i thought it would be. it was completely ominous and beautiful. the fact that this place is not only there but still operating is surreal, and surreal is the best word i can find for it. it's a juxtaposition. it's a contradiction. it's gorgeous. it's unreal that it exists as it does.

the "town", armagosa junction, was originally owned by the borax company which operated from nearby. when they stopped mining for borax, the town was abandoned. there is a hotel and gift shop operating in conjunction with the opera house. one of my favorite finds, along with a small cat i found painted in one of the mural's corners, was a tiny skull in the gift shop. it was not for sale. it was merely there for decoration.

this place exemplified noir which is why i processed a few of the photos as i did, dark and grainy like an old nosferatu movie, and while there, at any moment, i felt someone could enter the building a murder us all, not in a scary way, but in a romantic way, as if the opera house required the sacrifice to stay alive.

all the walls and ceilings are painted with wonderful murals depicting an old english theater's seating. along the top rows were the dignitaries. the middle would be the wealthy business owners and the bottom row of paintings are performers. we, in the seats on the floor, are in the cheap seats. my favorite is the mural of a man handing a rose down to his love. the entire thing is as whimsical as it is serious as it is horrifying.

here's the the armagosa opera house! not many things can surprise, but it did! CHEERS!

yesterday, i took a quick road trip with my friend carissa to death valley. i've been wanting to go there since i moved here. no idea why it took so long. it was pretty interesting. the sites we made it to were: scotty's castle, the sand dunes, artist's drive, ubehebe crater, badwater basin and zabriski point.

there was one more point of interest i wanted to see, but we ran out of time. i wanted to see the sailing rocks/racetrack. i've seen some images online before, and have wanted to see it. i will have to go back and check that out.

the most impressive thing for me was the volcano. it was enormous. the photograph doesn't do the size justice. i was shooting at 24mm, and i couldn't fit it all in. the drop was enormous. my fear of heights kept me from walking to the edge and looking in. my friend carissa kept telling me that it was a slope and not a drop. it didn't matter. once i noticed the size by looking at the other side, i couldn't even walk halfway from the car to the edge. the black landscape surrounding the volcano was quite eerie. it felt alien. a scifi movie about another planet could easily be filmed there.

while checking out scotty's castle, i spotted a fire hydrant which instantly reminded me of the movie "beavis and butthead do america". they're lost in the desert and dying of thirst. beavis says, "this desert is stupid. they need to put in a drinking fountain."

as we were leaving the park, we stopped at a site we spotted on the way in. it's not technically part of death valley, but it was still an amazing point of interest, the amargosa opera house. after wandering around the area a bit and stepping into the hotel's gift shop, we both came to the conclusion we'd go back for an opera soon. it was a little creepy, but that made it more interesting to me.

everything here is shot with a canon 6d and processed with photoshop and NIK.