More of Mineral Mountain Road, and fun with Photomatix

I went a little further south on Mineral Mountain road yesterday than I had the last time I was out there. There was a big storm far to the south, but I was hoping I might get into some rain. I was pretty sure that I would at least see some dust.

I went by the petroglyphs on the way out to Mineral Mountain Road. There were puddles full of tadpoles.

There were very few people out there. Too hot, I guess. It was around 108 when I left the pavement.

Tadpoles.

The further south I went on Mineral Mountain Road, the rougher it got. I figured it was OK, though, because it was mostly uphill. If I could go uphill over the rough spots, I would be able to go back downhill. I kept going until I got to a peak. The area looked vaguely familiar. If I was where I thought I was, the road would soon be so bad that it would be difficult to traverse on foot. There was a nice view of a small mountain and I got out of the truck to get some pictures. By the time I got out, though, dust was moving in front of the mountain.

Dust moving in to obscure the view.

I took my time turning around to get pictures of the Superstition Mountains in the other direction because I figured I had plenty of time to do that before the dust got in the way. The dust was sneaking by behind some hills to the east, though. When I turned around, the Supes were about to be hidden by dust. I quickly took some HDRI's.

HDRI made with typical settings. Ho-hum, and the dust hardly shows up.

Playing around with the settings. Now the dust stands out.

Zoomed in some.

I played around with Photomatix settings last night and got some interesting looking pictures.

It's hard to tell that there is dust in this picture, but I like the way it looks.

This is 20 or 30 minutes after the leading edge of the dust storm had gone by. The orange air is dust.

Click below to see all of the pictures.

2012_08_11

Pictures from yesterday's hike

I put pictures from yesterday's hike in a photo album this afternoon. Most are geotagged. I also have a bunch of pictures that I used Photomatix to enhance. Unfortunately, it also enhances the spots on the polarizer lens. I've about convinced myself that I need to buy it. The only problem is that I also found out that I pretty much need to carry a tripod with me if I'm going to use Photomatix. It takes less than a second for the camera to get the three pictures that serve as input to Photomatix, and Photomatix is able to compensate for some camera movement, but some of the processed pictures from yesterday make my eyes water if I look too closely at them.

I have a small tripod that I use for self portraits on hikes. It takes up very little room in my backpack and weighs almost nothing. I really need a full size tripod for the Photomatix pictures, though. My full size tripod is light, but I don't think it will fit in the backpack. At this time of year, I have to have a water bottle in one hand. If I have a tripod in the other hand, I won't be able to swat at gnats (or bees). Such a dilemma.

I put captions on most of the pictures, so I'm not going to talk about them here.

BC_2008_06_08