Pictures from a bit ago...
I've not posted in a while... I'm writing out a longish political post, but it's not done yet so I figured I'd spam you guys with pictures. I hear it's getting cold in some parts of the world (highs are still near 90 sometimes here), so I'll spread the warm by showing some deserty goodness!
One of the great bits about hiking (and photographing) around here is that you can get any climate you'd like; just change elevation! Tucson is at 2600 feet and 120 degrees in the summer; the highest mountains are 9500 and covered in feet of snow during the winter (and chilly in July, even)
These pictures are from the warm extreme of that: a hiking trip in May down in the low cactusland desert when my dad was out here, down on Douglas Springs Trail. It was scorching hot, and he wound up running out of water and had to use some of mine. :P
These are all ghettoresized with Picasa, so if they're a little artifacty don't blame me. :)
Hiking through terrain like this...
These brightly-colored lizards are awfully territorial -- when you come by they go scurry on top of a rock and flash their colory bits at you, then run away when you get too close if you're not careful. I was careful and got this picture:
Closeup:
A horned lizard/"horny-toad":
... and his eyeball:
A more plain lizard: These are everywhere. Apparently they just had babies now, because I see tiny lizards everywhere. Srsly, I can't leave my apartment without seeing them scurry off the sidewalk.
In the few places where there is water up in the mountains, stuff congregates. There was a nifty wasp up there (which I have pictures of; yell if you want to see) and ten zillion toads hanging out in cracks in the rock. This picture had ridiculously high contrast to begin with because of the harsh desert sun and shadows; it took some RAW-development wizardry to salvage it. When not using RAW, my camera has three levels of contrast: Low, Normal, and High. They ought to rename them "Arizona, Normal, Pennsylvania".
Closeup of toad. Cute, aren't they?
Toad eyeball:
Biggest lizard I've seen, hanging out in the hottest desert he could find down near the trailhead:
There's a "waterfall" (one month a year) a few miles up the trail called Bridalvale Falls, or something like that. We went up there, and I happened to see a raven's nest waaaaay up in the distance above the falls, with the pair of ravens flying around. So, naturally, I start climbing up there to go have a look. I got a bunch of pictures of them and of the nest from a long way off (since it was pretty inaccessible). I have a screw-on lens that magnifies stuff more. It's made of three pieces of glass: one on the front, one on the back, and then one in the middle that's responsible for correcting various optical aberrations. Sadly it's not all that sturdy, and the middle element came loose... resulting in pretty severe chromatic aberration in the pictures. Most of them were kinda poopy, but I figured that this one could be salvaged in a kinda-artistic way by changing it to black and white to cover up all the false colors. The super-high desert contrast conveniently looks like old B&W film, too...
One of the great bits about hiking (and photographing) around here is that you can get any climate you'd like; just change elevation! Tucson is at 2600 feet and 120 degrees in the summer; the highest mountains are 9500 and covered in feet of snow during the winter (and chilly in July, even)
These pictures are from the warm extreme of that: a hiking trip in May down in the low cactusland desert when my dad was out here, down on Douglas Springs Trail. It was scorching hot, and he wound up running out of water and had to use some of mine. :P
These are all ghettoresized with Picasa, so if they're a little artifacty don't blame me. :)
Hiking through terrain like this...
These brightly-colored lizards are awfully territorial -- when you come by they go scurry on top of a rock and flash their colory bits at you, then run away when you get too close if you're not careful. I was careful and got this picture:
Closeup:
A horned lizard/"horny-toad":
... and his eyeball:
A more plain lizard: These are everywhere. Apparently they just had babies now, because I see tiny lizards everywhere. Srsly, I can't leave my apartment without seeing them scurry off the sidewalk.
In the few places where there is water up in the mountains, stuff congregates. There was a nifty wasp up there (which I have pictures of; yell if you want to see) and ten zillion toads hanging out in cracks in the rock. This picture had ridiculously high contrast to begin with because of the harsh desert sun and shadows; it took some RAW-development wizardry to salvage it. When not using RAW, my camera has three levels of contrast: Low, Normal, and High. They ought to rename them "Arizona, Normal, Pennsylvania".
Closeup of toad. Cute, aren't they?
Toad eyeball:
Biggest lizard I've seen, hanging out in the hottest desert he could find down near the trailhead:
There's a "waterfall" (one month a year) a few miles up the trail called Bridalvale Falls, or something like that. We went up there, and I happened to see a raven's nest waaaaay up in the distance above the falls, with the pair of ravens flying around. So, naturally, I start climbing up there to go have a look. I got a bunch of pictures of them and of the nest from a long way off (since it was pretty inaccessible). I have a screw-on lens that magnifies stuff more. It's made of three pieces of glass: one on the front, one on the back, and then one in the middle that's responsible for correcting various optical aberrations. Sadly it's not all that sturdy, and the middle element came loose... resulting in pretty severe chromatic aberration in the pictures. Most of them were kinda poopy, but I figured that this one could be salvaged in a kinda-artistic way by changing it to black and white to cover up all the false colors. The super-high desert contrast conveniently looks like old B&W film, too...