Photographs, blog and reviews by a film photographer
August 2014 vacation iPhone photos and video
By Daniel J. SchneiderPosted:
August 3-6, 2014, Kate and I took a short vacation to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado to get away from civilization a bit. We roughed it in a tiny cabin and rumbled over the Continental Divide a few times in the Jeep.
We stayed at the Tomahawk Guest Ranch, which was a little rougher than we expected but perfectly wonderful. Our host was friendly and knowledgeable about the area, and did everything he could to make our stay a great vacation.
The cabin was small — about 10’x20′ — and included a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom with a tiny shower. Definitely not a place you want to hang out inside all day behind the tiny windows (the cabins were built in the 1930s), which was exactly what we needed. The main lodge has a pool table and a TV with several soft chairs and couches for viewing.
The cabin effectively encouraged us to spend our time out enjoying the mountains. We planned on that anyway, of course.
We spent a day rumbling over Slumgullion Pass, Engineer Pass and Cinnamon Passes as we explored the Alpine Loop and passed a dozen or so ghost towns and even more mine and mill sites.
We spent a day bouncing through remote BLM lands around the Powderhorn Valley south of Gunnison and through some barely-visible ghost towns in what is now mostly ranchland.
And we came home by way of a ghost town with a somewhat restored schoolhouse and then over the highest through-pass in Colorado, Mosquito Pass, the site of many more mines and ghost towns.
Through it all, I made a number of pictures with film that won’t be processed for a bit yet. But I also carried my iPhone some of the time and I even made a short video with it in the light of a small campfire our last night out.
All the photos below were taken with my shattered iPhone 5 with the ProCamera app, and edited on it using Snapseed. You’ll recognize some of them if you watched the video above, but not all of them were in there. I’ll let the captions tell the story from here, and give you plenty more when I get my film developed and publish those photos.