The -- Mostly -- Desert Scene

Here is another picture from the Painted Desert area. I was browsing through the pictures, and decided to try a bit of cropping on this one to see that I could do with it. The aspect is a bit wider than usual for me, but I like the effect.

South of Newspaper Rock the geology starts to change from the flat landscape of the painted desert as you enter the petrified forest proper. The tepees, shown here, are part of this striking change of scenario.

As you continue south, you start to see petrified logs. If you turn off into Blue Mesa, you'll see this hill:


as well as some petrified trees scattered in the area.

This is Newspaper Rock (the one in Arizona), a dense collection of petroglyphs in the Petrified Forest National Park. When you head south from the Painted Desert area of the park (pictured below), there is a turn-off to view it from an overlook. You pull up, and at first don't know where to look, unless someone else points it out to you. But as you look down below you, you see some large rocks, and slowly realize that they are covered with petroglyphs. Be sure to bring binoculars -- you are about 30 yards from the rock carvings!

Okay, so here's the deal. In December 2005, my wife gave me a new digital camera for Christmas. I used to do a lot of photography when in college and shortly afterwards, but quit for numerous reasons -- no more room for a darkroom, or time to take pictures, and film is pretty expensive if you rely on a photo lab. I started again a few years ago, with a small Fuji digital camera. It took nice pictures, but they were a bit small (3 megapixels) and show more digital noise than I like. The lens options were non-existent for that camera -- it had a 6x optical zoom integrated into the camera body. The display screen for the camera broke last year; hence the "need" for a new camera.

The new camera is a Konica-Minolta 5D, and takes quite nice 6 megapixel pictures. Back in college days, I used, and liked, Minolta cameras, so for me it was the logical choice. Once I started taking pictures, I wanted some venue to share them. I started with a basic web page -- you can see it with the "Older Pictures" link on the main page (or by clicking the link here). But some folks that found that page (here I mean you, Cricket) complained that they couldn't provide feedback. Hence I decided to try this blog format. The plan is to update at least once a week. I work from home, so that gives me an excuse to get out of the house -- taking the pictures, not the posting bit!

All of the pictures shown here (one so far, but more soon! :-) ) are reduced from the full size images and converted to jpeg format. You can see the full "reduced size" picture by clicking on the image on the blog page. I try to make the long dimension of the images 800 pixels, so that there is a reasonable amount of image definition. The full size pictures are shot in MRW format -- Minolta's raw format -- and sized at 3008 by 2000 pixels, with 12 bits of color information per pixel. Usually the image posted here is only lighly edited -- resized, color saturation sometimes lightly adjusted, and a bit of sharpening (aka "unsharp masking") to make the image look a bit crisper. More information is available on request -- just ask!

All of the pictures are copyrighted, of course. But I tend to not be too picky about sharing (with accreditation), so if you see something you like and would like to use it or just get a bigger copy, post a request and I'll see what I can do to help out!

Well, we'll give this a go to see how posting pictures in a blog format work. Expect some bigger updates (i.e. a few pictures) in the next few days, and -- eventually (sigh) -- a cleaner format for the site. Once I make one -- so don't hold your breath! I added one picture above to try it out.