Postcard from Tucson–Merry Christmas

Wishing You A Very Merry Christmas

Postcard from Arizona–More Rocks

It’s been a while since I have shared any of my rock photos with you, although I guess you could say almost all the photos I show from the Southwest are rock pictures.

But these rocks were in a large barrel in a rock shop in Quartzite, AZ. I stopped there about three years ago on my way to Yuma and started shooting rocks in a barrel (even easier than shooting fish in a barrel…sorry, could not resist).  Anyway, I just loves the colors in these rocks.

If you remember, Quartzite is that small town in the middle of the desert that gets over a million visitors a year…thanks to rock shows, RV shows, and on-going shows of all kinds. I am sure it is in full swing now as it is snow bird season. There, our friends from the north camp out in RV’s in the desert with no water, sewer, cable, or even electricity.  Generators supply the juice, and trucks come in every so often fill up their water tanks and empty the waste tanks. Satellite dishes supply the entertainment. It’s quite a life style and fun to see.

If you are ever down this way, be sure to stop in Quartzite and enjoy the “wild life.” It is located at the junction Arizona Highway 95 and I-10, very near the CA border. It is worth a visit in the winter months. 

Postcard from Yosemite - Tenaya Lake

When I get nostalgic, I somehow always return to Yosemite. I when I get real nostalgic, I think about Ansel Adams and his many years of photographing the park in black and white. So, I guess I am feeling nostalgic.

Tenaya Lake sits right on the Tioga Pass Road, at 8,150 feet in Yosemite’s High Country, on the North side of Yosemite Valley . (FYI, Yosemite Valley’s elevation is right at 4,000 feet). So its easy to get to, at least when the Tioga Pass Road is open. It is not maintained in the winter and shuts down as soon as the first snowflake falls. Just a few days after I took this photo, the first snowflake did fall and the road was closed. I would love to shoot the lake in winter, but I don’t ski.

The lake is supplied by a network of creeks and springs. Water exits the lake on the southwest side and becomes Tenaya Creek. From there it flows directly down Tenaya Canyon into Yosemite Valley. Its first stop there is famed Mirror Lake, directly below Half Dome. Eventually, it merges with Merced River, the main waterway through the valley.

Tenaya Lake is named after Chief Tenaya, who met the Mariposa Brigade near the shores of the lake. Tenaya protested that the lake already had a name: Pie-we-ack, or "Lake of the Shining Rocks." This original name is now attached to a granite dome to the east of the lake.

On two separate days, I hiked around the lake (where I could) and took several different shots. I have shown you a couple of the colored ones here before as there was a variety of quality colors in the shots. This one had limited colors, so I chose to do it in black and white…a good decision I think. I used a digital red filter to darken the sky and the lake.

If you ever travel the Tioga Pass Road and see the lake, be sure to park, get out and do some hiking. The best views are off the road.

Postcard from Island in the Sky–Green River Overlook

As you know by now, my friend and fellow photographer Dave Forster and I were up in Moab, UT a couple of weeks ago, shooting the beautiful landscapes that are all around this southeastern Utah city. Late one afternoon, we were high up in the Arches National Park scanning the sky trying decide where we wanted to be at sunset.  It did not look promising.

The places we had on our list all needed direct sunset light, but the clouds in the west were becoming thicker and thicker. Our prospects looked bleak. Then Dave came up with the brilliant idea of going to the Green River Overlook in the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands National Park. This is the same park where we shot Mesa Arch two mornings prior. With all the clouds in the sky, we might get lucky and have a fiery red sky at sunset…and this overlook is one of the most scenic in the park.

We drove about 40 miles to get there and arrived well before sunset. We scouted for the best view, then set up our cameras on tripods and just waited…and waited and waited.

The problem with shooting this scene was the canyon itself was already in deep, deep shadows before the sun even set. And if the sky lit up liked we hoped, the values between light and dark would be huge, far more than the camera could capture.  We both set up split neutral density filter…a glass plate that is very dark on top and clear on the bottom.  This allows less bright light into the camera helping with the exposure with no loss of colors. I also decided to shoot multiple exposures of each shot with a range of +1 to –1.  As it turned out, even these settings and filters were not enough.

After a long wait, the sun finally set, but the light still wasn’t right.  We had to wait even more to see if the sky would light up at what we call “second sunset.” Our patience was rewarded with a fierce red and yellow sky that looked like the entire sky was on fire. Both Dave and I shot, and shot, and shot until the fire died away after about 10 minutes. It was well worth the trip and a beautiful site to see.

After getting back to Tucson, I started working on the multiple exposures to try and create one HDR image. It turns out my exposure corrections were not quite enough.  Through the magic of Photoshop, I had to create a 4th and 5th exposure and combine them into one. It still was not enough to create the perfect picture, at least in my view. The canyons below were still too dark…which of course, gives them a bluish cast. 

So I played and played with some of my other filters to create the image you see above. It isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I do like it a lot.  It stands on its own. The ground picked up some of the red from the sky, which came out through the filters. And, of course the sky itself is amazing. But, at the time I shot this image, the ground was in total darkness to the naked eye. I am just glad the camera was able to pick up some light. PS: It took over three hours of playing to create this image.

And by the way, this is one of the best overlooks in the park. Don’t miss it if you happen to be in the area…sunrise, sunset, or any time in between.

Postcard from the Arches–Double Arch

I know that I’ve shown you Double Arch before in this blog…that being from my trip two years ago. This image was taken only a couple of weeks ago on my most recent trip. Not much has changed here in two years, except the sky. Still this arch remains my favorite of them all.

Double Arch was formed a bit differently than most of the arches in Arches National Park. It is what is known as a pothole arch as it formed by water erosion from above rather than more typical erosion from the side. The largest opening has a span of 148 feet and a height of 104 feet. It was also seen briefly in the film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” although the cave seen in the film behind it does not exist.

It’s only a short 1/2 mile walk from the parking lot to it and there are no barriers to going under the arch or all around it. And as you can see, I am also almost directly underneath it.

Since the last time I showed you Double Arch was in color, I decided to give you a black and white treatment this time.

Postcard from the Arches–Balanced Rock

Sometime ago, I shared a photo of Balanced Rock at sunset. In that image, you could only see the profile of the rock set against a fiery sky. So, I decided to show you the rock in daylight, although it is getting towards sunset in this image. It is quite a remarkable sandstone formation and is one of the most famous landmarks in Arches National Park.

Balanced Rock is about 128 feet high, with the balancing rock rising 55 feet above the base.  Until recently, Balanced Rock had a companion…a similar, but much smaller balanced rock named "Chip Off The Old Block", which fell during the winter of 1975. You can see the pedestal where it stood to the right of Balanced Rock. One day, its big brother will fall also. Such is nature.

Getting to the rock is easy as it sits right by the main park road. There is a parking lot there so you can hike all around it if you wish. The snow covered mountains in the distant background are the LaSalle Mountains.

This is another in my experiments with HDR photography.

Postcard from Chicago - Legs

If you ride the #6 bus into downtown Chicago, as I’ve done many times, you turn onto Michigan Ave. from Roosevelt Road. There on the corner, in the lower section of Grant Park, are 106 headless and armless cast iron sculptures. It is a sight that first amazes, then intrigues the first time tourist to Chicago.

It is called “Agora,” by its creator, Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz.  The name Agora refers to the meeting places of the Ancient Greek city-states. Each sculpture is about nine feet high and weighs about 1,800 pounds. They were cast in Poland over a two-year period, then transported to Chicago. Installation took place in November of 2006.

The figures are similar in general shape, but differ in their details. Models for each figure were made by hand. The surfaces of figures are like a tree bark or wrinkled face expressing a different individuality of each sculpture. They all appear to be walking in different directions. As Mayor Daily once pointed out, one really needs to walk through it to understand and feel its meaning…and I agree with him.

Chicago is filled with such interesting works of art, many of which you have seen here, from crazy shaped bridges, to giant lattice works, legs, and even eyeballs. I have said it before, it is a wonderful place to just wander and see the diversity of people, neighborhoods, and, of course, art. Definitely put in on your to-do list if you have never been there.

Postcard from the Arches–The Fiery Furnace at Sunset

This picture was taken on my trip last month into the Arches National Park. It shows a very small part of the Fiery Furnace section of the park, set against the LaSalle Mountains.   For two days, we were very fortunate to have a haze-free unobstructed view of the mountains…not always possible.

The Fiery Furnace is a large series of small canyons, many of them dead-ends, set inside many, many fins.  Inside you will find both small and large arches. It is highly recommended for newbies that you take a ranger-led tour inside the furnace.  Having done that, I will tell you it is the only way to go. It would be so easy to get lost in there.  If I went back in, I would still only go with a ranger. Its an arduous hike through there, and some time I will tell you about my experiences, but what is inside the furnace is well worth the hike.  By the way, on a hot summer day, it’s the coolest place in the park, in spite of its name.

For this photograph, I again experimented with HDR photography, using 5 separate photos to come up with a composite photo that shows the best exposure values for each part of the photo. Only this time, I didn’t shoot 5 exposures on site…I only shot one.  In Photoshop, I created 5 separate images using a full one stop value for each. In other words the exposures went from –2 to +2, with the original photo as the 0 point.  Then using a program called Photomatix, I combined all five into one shot.

Of course, the final image had to be tweaked again in Photoshop as they never come out of Photomatix perfectly. I like some of the things I can do with HDR and will be experimenting with it more in the future.  Stay tuned for more in the future.

Postcard from Yuma–Swastika Bridge

Travel about 20 miles northeast of Yuma on Laguna Dam Road to where the pavement ends. Travel just a few hundred feet past that point, and you will find this bridge, covered in swastikas.  Not painted mind you, but cast in concrete on both sides of the bridge.

Swastika on an American bridge? How can that be? The mind boggles with possibilities. Was it built by German prisoners of war during the Second World War as there were POW camps nearby? By Nazi sympathizers prior to war’s outbreak?

Actually, the truth is stranger than fiction.  You see this bridge was completed in 1907. Hitler was only 18 years old so the Nazi Party wasn’t even conceived yet. That was at least 21 years in the future.

No, this bridge was built by the United States Government…specifically the Department of the Interior through the Bureau of Reclamation (then called the U.S. Reclamation Service). This bridge spans a now-unused agricultural spillway that was part of the first dam ever built on the Colorado River.

To make a long story short, because of existing geological considerations, the design for the dam was taken from an existing dam in India. While there, U.S. government representatives heard the story of the ancient Hindu God, Indra, who at one time, represented thunder, lighting and rain. Indra (who had four arms and was represented by the swastika with its four arms) had the power to control water. 

There were those in the U.S. government who thought the swastika would be a fitting symbol for the Bureau.  During its early years the United States Bureau of Reclamation used the swastika for its symbol. The swastikas on Laguna Dam are a legacy of that period. The Bureau also designed a Reclamation flag with a large swastika at its center with the U S R S letters in the four corners.

During WWII, guards had to be posted round the clock to protect the bridge as local citizens threatened to destroy the bridge, or at least remove the swastikas. Today, the bridge is the only government project left standing in the United States where swastikas are an integrated part of the structure. 

As I said, it is a strange, but all to true tale of our past. I thank my son Eric who first told me about this bridge and did the initial research.