2012 - Looking back, part 4

 

I had a very busy travel schedule this year and one of my business trips required my presence in Arizona. I stayed through the weekend and spent some time in the Red Rocks around Sedona. Not far from Sedona is Jerome, an old mining town, charming, and with lots of places for photography. One of them is the Gold King Mine and Ghost Town. I wrote about it in April here in the blog. Feel free to click in the archive to see more pictures about this place if you like. I couldn't be choosy about the time to be there and just had to deal with the harsh light of the Arizona sun. I did a lot of bracketing, usually between five and nine exposure steps. This one is the front porch of one of the old buildings in the ghost town. The final picture was made out of five images, each one f-stop apart, in NIK's HDR Efex Pro software. Black & white works very well for the structure of the old wood and it gives the image that nostalgic look that I like.

Nature clicks #99 (or Arizona, part 5)

The only wildlife I had in front of my lens in Arizona was this lizard, who was very well camouflaged on this old tree trunk. While I processed the image on my computer I  became aware that this  is actually a "butt shot" and but shots are rude. Lizards are not running around here in Eastern Iowa in great numbers and so I think it is ok to show this picture anyway ;-) . I still like the shot because the lizard placed himself in this sunny spot on the tree trunk. The picture was taken just below the Montezuma Castle, a pueblo that was built in the cliffs of the Verde Valley. The Southern Sinagua, a culture that lived and farmed in the Verde Valley, built these pueblos by about 1150 but they were abandoned by the early 1400s for unknown reasons. Montezuma Castle is one of the best preserved prehistoric structures in the Southwest. (Source: Visitor information brochure Montezuma Castle / Tuzigoot,  National Park Service)

More from Arizona, part 4

 

I'm still working on my images from last week's trip to Arizona and I like to show you a few more.

The little miner town Jerome has a very interesting attraction. The Gold King Mine and Ghost Town is just a mile north of Jerome. A fascinating place, hard to describe with words (at least for me).The location of the Gold King Mine was originally the community of Haynes, a suburb of Jerome in 1890.   If you like to read more about it click HERE. This will lead you to the Sedona Verde Valley Tourism Council website, which has a pretty good story about this place and its owner.

As a photographer you may get lost. It is not hard to make up your mind where to point the lens first. Lots of good old stuff. As an engineer, I just got carried away by looking at all the old mechanical wonders of the past. From old mining equipment, to probably more than a hundred old trucks and cars, machines and tools, and of course the old buildings of the ghost town.

The museum closes at 5PM and light is harsh during the day. But hey, we have HDR these days and subjects, like you can find them in a historical place like this, can bare quite a bit of "HDR-retro-tweaking", as I like to call it. Nothing to loose for me... ;-)

Red Rock Country, part 3

A wonderful place to be is the Slide Rock State Park, located in the Oak Creek Valley between Flagstaff and Sedona, Arizona. I stopped there yesterday morning. The colors of the surrounding canyon walls were still not washed out, like later during the day, and I tried to capture the essence of this lovely landscape.

The house at the entrance of the state park caught my attention. I love how the white trim and the stairs speak a clear graphic language and emphasize the design of the house in its natural setting.

3413 + 2164

Today, on my way back to Phoenix, I stopped at several interesting locations. One of them was the train depot in Clarkdale, Arizona. Unfortunately the passenger train had already left for a tour with visitors, but those two diesel locomotives were parked at the depot. The puffy clouds made for a nice  background and nobody was there to bother me while I took the pictures between the railroad tracks. More to come...

Red Rock Country

 

Another week of traveling. Well you guessed it, I'm in Arizona where record high temperatures are expected for this weekend. I worked the walls of the Red Rocks around Sedona with my camera this evening. Will be here until Sunday. The light during the day isn't exciting and the sky is always boring blue but I see it as a challenge. Stay tuned...