Busy pictures and Klingons

I was admiring somebody's picture on Panoramio and saw that the photographer had made the comment that he almost didn't post it because it was so busy. I've noticed that there is a characteristic of a lot of my pictures that annoys me. Maybe it's that they're "busy", though I'm not really sure what that is. I'd wager that it wouldn't be easy to find a definition. And I'm not sure what I can do about that busy-ness. I think I just take pictures of busy places. Yes, this is a busy desert, and since I try to capture everything that's there so I can show it to other people, my pictures must be very busy. Anyway, I decided I would go out to the Crosscut Trailhead and see if I could get a picture that wasn't so busy.

I'm off to a bad start. This looks awfully "busy" to me. I wanted to show you what the view is like from the parking area, though.

Again, busy. I think that's unavoidable when you take pictures of things like this, though. This thing, by the way, was constructed either by druids or drunken teenagers. Or maybe by drunken teenage druids.

Since the "busy-ness" seems unavoidable, maybe I can counteract it with something substantial in the foreground. This still seems busy, though.

Maybe with excessive "busy-ness", and a few substantial foreground objects, it would all blend in to monotonous nothingness and allow my subjects to stand out. Or maybe not. I can't tell.

More along that theme, except is the subject the saguaro or the mountain? No matter. I like it, busy or not.

I took this as an example of what I think "busy" is. Can you put this in words that would make sense to an engineer?

After a while, I wound up in a place with very few brittle bushes or those other little bushes whose name I can never remember. I thought this might be a good chance to get an un-busy picture. That's where I came across what looked like coveralls. They were pretty torn up, as if some scavengers had shredded them to get at what was inside. I looked around the area for bones but didn't see any. Then I spotted a patch of ground that was mysteriously devoid of all plant life. It had a very sharp border. It was then obvious what had happened to the owner of the coveralls. He had been standing where that bare patch is now when he had been zapped by a Klingon disruptor ray and was vaporized. This is what's cool about hiking off-trail. You just don't find stuff like this on the heavily traveled trails.

To be sure that's what happened, I continued searching for bones. Lack of bones would prove the disruptor ray theory. Either that or trying to figure out this "busy" stuff is affecting my ability to think logically. Anyway, I considered the possibility that a murderer had hid a body in the nearby wash and scavengers had gotten to it. I headed down into the wash.

In the wash. Yes, it's busy. And possibly contradictory.

Down in the wash was a pile of large rocks, about 2 feet wide and 5 feet long. Just the kind of thing a lazy murderer would do to hide a body. The same lazy murderer that carried the body half a mile from the road. Wait, that doesn't make a lot of sense. The lazy bum also put cairns around the rocks, so he ... could find what he was trying to hide ... Oh, the Klingon theory is starting to make a lot more sense now. Besides, I never did find any bones. Yep. Klingons. Click below to see all of the busy pictures.

2012_03_14