Willow Creek tinaja and random ramblings

A month or two ago I had tried hiking up a part of Willow Creek that I hadn't seen before and was stopped at a large tinaja with steep cliffs on both sides. I went back there last week to see if it has dried up yet. It seems to be very deep, though, and still has lots of water in it.

The water level has dropped more than 2 feet since the last time I was here. There's still a lot of water in there.

There were lots of birds around when I arrived. I also heard several "plops" as frogs jumped into the water. I sat still on a rock by the tinaja and the birds slowly came back and the frogs crawled out of the water. I could only stand to sit there for about 10 minutes, though. The rock was in the shade but it had been in the sun all day. I was getting really hot, and it was late enough in the day that there was no breeze.

From 2013_06_25

I often see these wasps at desert watering holes. I ignore them and they ignore me.

A toad half buried in the gravel. Tinajas always have lots of honey bees around them, too.

A couple of days before I went out there, I was sitting around thinking random thoughts and I randomly remembered that my camera will allegedly take HDRIs. Willow Creek is a good place to test that. I was disappointed. I guess the camera needs to be on a tripod. Using a tripod every time I wanted an HDRI would be much more trouble than the time I spend crunching pictures at home now. Canon doesn't have a good HDRI solution yet.

Speaking of Canon, they make nice cameras but their clocks are barely better than hour glasses. The clocks in their cameras gain or lose two or three minutes every week. That's significant when you want to geotag your pictures. I have to set my camera clock at least once I week. I've had to do that with every Canon camera I've owned. I've gotten free watches in boxes of cereal that didn't gain or lose that much in the 3 years it took for their battery to go dead. I set them once and never had to mess with them again. Why can't Canon do that?

Click below for all of the pictures.

2013_06_25