I'm back from a long weekend in Salt Lake City visiting family.
In lieu of an actual post with actual content, I offer these three photographs, taken earlier today on my drive back to Vegas.
First is this oddity. I stopped in Mesquite for a snack and noticed these lollipops by the cash register. They have small but real scorpions embedded in them.
Why anybody would want to eat a lollipop with that waiting a few licks in is beyond my comprehension.
Next up is something that catches my attention every time I drive through St. George, Utah: A series of highway signs for "Bluff St." I think maybe I should live there.
Finally, I have to give you a mountain shot. Ones I took near the city this morning didn't turn out very well because of a thick layer of haze. Actually, that's what made the sight quite interesting: the mountain ridge appeared to be floating against a blue sky. But a stupid cell phone camera could not do the scene justice. Further south, I found a photogenic section of low mountains near the entrance to the Virgin River Valley part of I-15. (In case you've never made the drive, I-15 cuts through a corner of Arizona for maybe 25 miles, and it's an amazing contrast. You very, very suddenly go from being surrounded by basically flat desert on both sides to being swallowed up by steep rock canyons. Then, just as suddenly, 15 or 20 miles later, you emerge, and have flat desert on both sides again. It's a strange and memorable experience.) It was really lovely with late-afternoon light and a beautiful blue sky. I took a series of photos to digitally stitch together a panorama, but only after making it did I appreciate the range of light that the scene had. You can see that the left side of the shot (which is nearly 180 degrees, though you may not be able to discern that) is in shadows from the mountains, but the sunlight fully hits the south face of the hills to the north. The results, unfortunately, isn't very convincing as a single image. Oh well. Click on it to see the big version anyway.
Poker life resumes tomorrow.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Home again
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Wow, some great pics. That last one is really good for a cell phone.
And as for a scorpion lollipop... I have no words...
Why would anybody want to eat that? What are you supposed to do when you get down to the scorpion? Ugh disgusting...
Excellent landscape picture there Grump. Have you been taking lessons from Cardgrrl?
In the world of shooting, we say that not-very-skilled shooters adopt the technique of "spray and pray." I.e., they pour lots of rounds downrange as fast as they can pull the trigger and just hope something will hit. With experience, you instead learn to hit exactly what you're aiming at, get the desired results with one shot, and move on.
Well, my photographing strategy is basically spray and pray. I take a lot of pictures and hope that something looks semi-decent. You can sense that whenever I upload a day's worth of shots to Flickr or Picasa. Lots and lots of generic, mediocre stuff.
Cardgrrl doesn't do that. She takes a few select shots (more recently when experimenting with a new camera) and they look great.
So no--she hasn't been giving me lessons. I think it's all she can do not to tell me my pictures suck.
Two quick thoughts:
1) In the era of digital cameras EVERYONE should be taking a ton of pictures. There's no expensive film to waste, so why not take as many images as you can to get the one keeper. On a recent half-hour photo spree I shot 94 images. The vast majority of them went straight to the trash, but so what? Photography is very much an editorial art.
2) I think the Grump's pictures suck so much that I featured one of them on my other blog, Something Beautiful.
Post a Comment