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California Desert Wildflower Viewing

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Tiny pink California desert wildflowers
Tiny pink California desert wildflowers
Anza Borrego Desert State Park
El Nino has been good to us in Southern California where we have had above average rainfall this winter for a change. Actually the rain we had yesterday (today is a glorious day, by the way) meant my friend Denise and I had to postpone a trip we were going to do this weekend to the Algodenes Sand Dunes hoping for some great shots. We will try again in a couple of weeks.

All this rain, though, means that the wildflowers in the deserts of Southern California will put on a a great show this spring. The LA Times travel section today listed some good websites for getting up-to-date information on the state of the bloom in the various deserts which I am listing below. One of my favorite places to visit is Anza Borrego Desert State Park which is in San Diego County. Easily accessible from where I live in Orange County, it offers many great places to explore.
I took the picture of the gold daisy and the well-camouflaged gold caterpillar in Anza Borrego two years ago. Yes, if you look close enough you will see the caterpillar. I have to say when I took this photo, it was only when I zoomed in with the lens that I noticed it myself.
If you live in Southern California or the Desert Southwest, make sure you make the most of the spring wildflower season, as before too long it will be hot and dry again in these parts and who knows when we will be lucky enough again to have El Nino bring us above-average rainfall.






Desert USA keeps track of the status of wildflower bloom for all the deserts of the South West. Here's a link to their page for the wildflower reports for the California deserts.


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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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