February 2023

POTD: Lit Saguaro

Lit Saguaro
Kofa Mountains, Arizona
2022

We’ve been in the Tucson area which is replete with saguaro cacti for over a month now but this one is one of the first ones I spotted on the trip here in late December. Or more precisely, it was the first one that really caught my eye when I was taking the time to observe them closely. I liked the bright lit cactus against the darker background of the cloud shaded mountains.

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POTD: Kofa Shadows #1

Kofa Shadows #1
Kofa Mountains, Arizona
2022

Back in camp after our short hike up Palm Canyon, I ended up spending much of the afternoon in my lawn chair just staring at (and photographing) the mountains. I had not planned to do that–after all I was thinking a shot or two would cover the worthwhile views nicely. But the scattered clouds moving over the area kept casting such interesting and changing shadows over various parts of the mountains I was enticed to just sit and keep watching and shooting. Every time I thought I’d finally lost interest in the view, it would change yet again.

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POTD: Palm Canyon

Palm Canyon
Kofa Mountains, Arizona
2022

I first heard about Palm Canyon when I was living in Arizona in the mid 1970s. It’s the only place in Arizona where one can find California fan palm trees growing in their native habitat. I thought that would be worth a visit someday. About 45 years later I finally made it there. We camped just outside the mouth of the canyon one night and while there hiked the short trail up the canyon to see the palm trees way up in niches in a narrow side canyon. It was neat to (finally) see the palm trees but I was much more taken by the canyon itself as well as the whole Kofa mountain setting. The photos I took of the palm trees are not particularly worthy but the ones of the mountains were I think. This one is looking out the mouth of the canyon from up near the palm tree viewing area.

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POTD: Earthshine

Earthshine
Mojave National Preserve, California
2022

The earthshine (the sunlight reflected from the earth’s surface that illuminates part of the moon not directly lighted by the sun) during the crescent moon was quite visible when we were out on the Mojave Desert last month. It looked great so I thought it worth trying to capture it with my camera. This is an o.k. image but how I got it was pretty much a textbook example of how not to do it.

With the human eye (aided by binoculars or a long telephoto lens of course) it’s easy to see both the craters on the sunlit part of the moon as well as some of the detail on the moon’s night side which is much less brightly lit by the reflected light from the earth. But a single exposure with a camera will generally either result in the sunlight part of the moon being way overexposed or the earthlit part being way underexposed. There is no real middle ground for the exposure settings that will give a decent single result.

To address this issue is pretty easy if you use the kinds of advanced camera and computer tools available to the modern photographer. First of course you should really shoot with a tripod. I have two nice tripods, both safely stashed at home in Montana, so I was shooting handheld. Secondly, you should take advantage of the high dynamic range (HDR) settings available on many cameras and/or the appropriate computer software. But that approach only works well if you’re using a tripod.

So I did it the old fashioned kludgy way–I took one image exposed for the sunlit part of the moon and one exposed for the earthshine part and laboriously combined them in Photoshop. I say laborious because for a number of reasons it was much more difficult to get a decent looking image than I thought it would be. I easily spent a couple hours tweaking what I had to get what you see here. It’s not perfect but gives a good representation of what I could see with my eye looking through my telephoto camera lens. And it was a good lesson in being better prepared in the field next time!

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