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

A little sunshine

Over the Christmas break, I went hiking every other day, regardless of the weather. It seemed that it worked out to be cloudy on the days I was hiking and sunny on the days that I wasn't. I checked the weather forecast for this weekend and it said it was going to be cloudy on Saturday and partly sunny on Sunday. So I stayed home most of Saturday. Late in the afternoon I noticed a little sunshine. I decided I had better take advantage of that and hopped in the truck. Since I didn't have much daylight left, I headed down First Water road to the Jacob's crosscut trail, near the Superstition Mountains.

A little bit of sunshine.

There wasn't a lot of sunshine getting through the clouds, but there were some photogenic clouds. I went to the top of a small hill and took pictures until it got too dark. I took a lot of HDRIs, mostly to get the clouds to look good.

Non-HDRI. I like the way the mountains look.

HDRI. I like the way the clouds look.

Some day when I feel really ambitious I may try combining parts of pictures that I like. I think I have software that I could use to do that.

Superstition Mountains in silhouette.

Interesting clouds, lots of cholla in the foreground.

Click below for all of the pictures. No map this time.

2010_01_16