(Bristol Lake, 2005. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

Another flag... I pulled off the road beside Bristol Lake, a dry salt- and dust-pan near Amboy in the Mojave, and started taking shots with the big camera (my 6x7) of a bunch of mountains and tracks away from the road. After about 20 minutes of this, I turned around to get something to drink out of my truck. And there it was, this fluttering red ... flag ... off a few hundred metres away. I just took a couple of snapshots with the little D100 with a long(ish) lens, and didn't think much more about it until I reviewed the shots a day or two later back in Barstow. It became one of my favourite shots of the entire ten day trip.

What works for me about this shot? The off-centred geometry, of course, and the odd combination of bright red, reflective dark yellow, steel grey, and the natural pastels of the Bristol mountains in the background. And the narrow white horizontal stripe of the salt pans intersecting the image. And the lone pale grey-green saltbush out of focus behind the red.

But what always works for me with this sort of shot is the evocation of its taking -- the silence, the wind, the heat, the glare, the sand beneath my boots, the strong smell of salt and clean dirt, the solitude, the discovery...