Joshua Tree – yucca brevifolia
A Joshua Tree, yucca brevifolia, in the Joshua Tree National Park in California

Joshua Tree – yucca brevifolia

[pp_gallery id=”10776″ style-id=”b9135975-db79-4c57-b3f4-b570ef888bd7″]

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The Joshua Tree – Yucca Brevifolia, is found in the Mojave of southern .

I captured this example when I swung through the Joshua Tree National Park in either late 1995 or 1996.

These days your camera records when you took the photo, and often also where. But I captured this image on slide film and the EXIF data on this has long left my memory and I can't find I wrote it down anywhere.

The Joshua Tree name precedes the album by U2. Some say the early Mormon settlers named the , imagining them showing the way across the as Joshua had guided the Israelites in conquering Canaan.

The Spanish name for the tree, izote de desierto, translates as “ dagger” which is a far less halucinatory name than Joshua Tree.

Of course, the early Mormon settlers wouldn't have had all the distractions of modern day devices. I like to think they would have challenged their children to come up with names based on Bible stories to pass the time as their wagons wandered through this .

Climate change models predict these will have their range reduced and shifted. Some studies show that there could be very few left in the national park by the end of the century.

Image Processing:

For this image I:

  • Scanned the original slide with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED
  • Cropped the image in Adobe Lightroom
  • Cleaned up some scratches on the film with Adobe Photoshop
  • Used Skylum Luminar 4 to adjust the image
  • Applied the Tonal Contrast from DXO Nik Collection 3 to lessen the graininess of the scan
  • Blended the Skylum and DXO layers in Adobe Photoshop

Camera:

Taken with a Canon EOS5 (A2E) film camera on either Velvia or Kodak Ektachrome.