Unreachable

This Sunday morning shoot was full of mistakes. Honestly, it’s amazing I came away with a usable image at all.

The morning started at 4:30 a.m. with no coffee because I forgot to put water in the coffee maker the night before. There wasn’t time to wait for a fresh pot since I was hoping to make a sunrise capture.

I headed out to the Placeholder location and waited for the first light to hit Estrella Mountain. After taking my meter readings and setting the exposure, I drove to the end of the road with the intention of mounting the Chamonix on the window mount and making the photograph quickly before the light changed. But when I arrived, someone was already there working on the irrigation equipment. Not knowing how they would react to someone photographing the area, I decided not to risk it. I turned the truck around and left.

Not wanting to go home empty-handed, I started searching for another location. After several stops that led nowhere, I came across a dead-end road lined with power lines and blocked by a large construction barrier. I set up the tripod and photographed several compositions, but the frame with the barrier immediately stood out as the strongest.

Even after running out of film, I still wasn’t ready to call it a morning. I spent the next couple of hours scouting future locations and came away with several promising possibilities. What began as a frustrating start ended up becoming one of the most productive Sunday mornings I’ve had in quite some time.

So I present Unreachable, the 26th image in my ongoing series, Finding Estrella.

In the photograph, Estrella Mountain sits quietly in the distance beyond a corridor of utility poles, graded earth, and a temporary construction barrier. The mountain remains fully visible, yet the landscape feels psychologically closed off — interrupted, measured, and increasingly inaccessible. The open desert still exists, but only conditionally, suspended between what it once was and what it is about to become.