February 18, 2017 – Saguaro Cactus Landscape

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Sometimes black-and-white is the only way to go. There’s a timelessness to black-and-white landscapes that is almost universally appealing. This was taken while hiking through the mountain run-off in Sabino Canyon last week. My feet were wet and squishy from tromping through knee-deep water, tromping up to the Seven Falls area.

A thunderstorm rolled through and cut the hike short, but it was an exquisite several hours in the canyon.

Getting out into the world, walking the downtown streets or the canyons are going on my ‘urban hikes’ are terribly important to me. There’s so much to discover out there, even just walking around the block, if one takes a moment to concentrate, train themselves to really keep their eyes open all the time.

I hope you like today’s photograph. Cheers.

“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”
Jim Richardson

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February 05, 2017 – Textures On The Trail

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One of my favorite things to do is train my camera on the ground. It’s painfully easy to walk around your own neighborhood and find absolutely nothing interesting. And hell – It’s completely natural for the places we spend the most of our time to become completely innocuous to us. Looking through the camera lens is a way to help renew one’s vision. There are amazing things all around, just waiting to be discovered. You just have to have the eyes and the right mindset to see.

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
Alfred Stieglitz

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January 26 – Agave Americana

01-26 Agave Americana post

Several years ago, I was in the habit of hiking the hilltop behind my house. I did this on an almost daily basis – sometimes early in the morning to try and capture photographs of the hummingbirds, and sometimes at dusk, as the light turned golden yellow. During the monsoon season, the skies swell with dramatic light-grabbing clouds. I think I made so many pictures of the area at that time, I began to forget how truly dazzling the scenery was; most of the pictures remain in the dark, unpublished and under-utilized in my catalog.

The silhouette is the dried corpse of an agave americana plant. These spires line the hills in the mountains of Southern Arizona and are as recognizable in the borderlands as the Saguaro Cactus (think Roadrunner and Wile W. Coyote cartoons) is just a hundred miles north in Tucson and the Coronado National Forest.

Commonly referred to as a “century plant,” they don’t actually live quite that long. These drought-resistant buggers typically live between ten and thirty years.

I figured a sunset photograph would be a nice book-end to my birthday. Thirty-three years ago I arrived on this peculiar organic spaceship, this mossy rock flying through the cosmos. A wetware android, my brain has been gathering information and making connections ever since that day, furiously trying to make sense of everything.

I’m not sure how successful I’ve been, but it sure is fun trying.
Most of the time.

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