Monday, February 01, 2010

Fallen Giants

We had some stormy weather a couple of weeks ago. It involved a lot of rain (up to 4 inches in some places) and a lot of wind. It blew 40 mph or harder all day one day. A lot of trees along a major road near our house blew over. I didn't think about all of this having an effect on the desert, though.

Last Friday I went for a drive through part of Bulldog Canyon. I was going along the road trying to decide where to stop and what to do when I spotted a saguaro that had just fallen over. I got out to get a closer look and take some pictures, then got back in the truck. It wasn't long before I saw another fallen saguaro. While I was looking at it, I spotted another.


The first fallen saguaro that I found.


Domino saguaros, one fell on top of another one.


Almost took out a cholla.


A paloverde blew over, too.

As I was leaving Bulldog Canyon, the moon came up. I took a LOT of pictures of it. I got the tripod out and took exposure bracketed shots to make HDRIs. I haven't found the right Photomatix settings to get the HDRIs come out, though. The moon always looks overexposed.


A non-HDRI of the moonrise.

Some day when I'm feeling ambitious I'll see if I can figure out those moonrise HDRIs. In the mean time, here are all of Friday's pictures.

BC_2010_01_29

3 comments:

Adam Elliott said...

Nice moon shot. How long does it take for those saguaro's to get that big?

Adam Elliott said...

Also, was that moon rise the recent one that was supposed to be the biggest and brightest of the year?

Unknown said...

Thanks.

Saguaros grow very slowly. They are about 60 years old before they start putting out arms. A lot of them that had fallen were probably 80 to 100 years old and some were probably older.

I don't know if that full moon was at perigee or not. I can't tell by looking at it if it's any bigger or not, so I don't pay much attention when there's news about it being closer and bigger.

I remember 2 or 3 years ago there was a lot of hoopla about Mars being close to Earth and it was going to look as big as the full moon. Adults my age were even repeating that nonsense. I've been glancing up at Mars now and then for 40 years, so I knew it couldn't look that big. What have all these other people been doing all their lives? OK, I took off and ran with that one. I'll shut up now. Thanks for visiting.