Dormant Shrub in Anza Borrego Desert

Here are a couple of versions of a dormant shrub in Plum Canyon at Anza-Borrego State Park. Dead and dormant desert plants can make pretty interesting subjects for photos because of things like their starkness, their shapes, and the fact that the elements often exposes a lot of the grain in the wood.

This spindly shrub caught my attention among the wildflowers. I developed a couple of versions of the photo: one accentuates the yellows in the wood, while in the other I worked to develop a warm gray. I wonder which one you prefer?

View and compare them in the Plant Photo Gallery

(Dial-up optimized Plant Photo Gallery)

Cholla Cactus - Anza-Borrego Desert

This very sculptural-looking cactus is alluringly beautiful and drops the ends of its branches onto the ground like little balls. But woe to anyone or anything that merely brushes even gently against it as its thorns are incredibly sharp and barbed. A gentle touch with the tip of the rubber toe on my shoe and the spines were a half-inch into the rubber and impossible to pull back out! Beware of these beauties if you visit Anza-Borrego desert.

This cactus plant is actually a Cholla Cactus. There are several varieties, but this one is Cylindropuntia bigelovii or the "Teddy Bear Cholla", so named because of it's fuzzy appearance. That cute fuzziness, however, is the mass of spines covering the plant. One of my friends knows this cactus as "the widowmaker"! You can read about this and other Cholla cacti at Wikipedia: Teddy-Bear Cholla. Or additionally at this Living Desert posting which describes clearly the perils of encountering this deceptively-looking teddy-bear.

Full-sized photos of this cactus can be seen in the Plants Photo Gallery (Dial-up Plants Photo Gallery)

Ginkgo Trees in Fall

I know I'm a bit late for this, it being winter now and all that, but can't let these beautiful ginkgo trees near the Pomona Fair Grounds in L.A. go by. This is nature's palette at it's best with yellow and green on blue.

Ginkgo trees have always been my autumn favorites. There a many of them along Prince's Street in Auckland right by the University of Auckland. I always used to think the carpet of bright yellow leaves that fell around the trees was the closest thing to yellow snow that you could get...and I'm not talking about anything to do with dogs here!

These Asian giants now come in dwarf varieties, which really pleases me since I love them so much, and I have two of the little beauties in my garden in pots.

Getty Center Garden Reeds

One of the most frustrating things about posting photos to the Internet is the need to "optimize" the file size so that the images don't take too long to load. And you need to consider that many people are still using dial-up to access the Internet, so if you want people to spend time looking at your photography, you have to basically size the images for the slowest connections. This means converting your files from an uncompressed format, to the standard compressed image file format that we all know as jpeg.

The frustrating thing is that in doing so you lose so much image information that was was a bright and varied palette ends up flat and "dumbed-down" in terms of its color range. Then there's the whole range of monitors out there too, some with millions of color available and well-calibrated, to those that are best suited to rendering text, not colorful images.

This photo of reeds in the garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is a case in point. The original photo has a rich palette of color consisting of greens, blues, some red, and yellow. Turn it into a jpeg file and it becomes very gray. It was so bad that for the first time I even spent some time trying to adjust the colors of the jpeg image. Still, its a mere shadow of the original. This photo will print beautifully from the uncompressed file, and will greatly exceed any expectations gained from viewing it online.

Just so that you can get some idea of what the original looks like, I have created a small tiff file of the photo - small for tiff, that is; 400x500p pixels with a mere 75dpi resolution. It's 800kb nonetheless, but if you have the bandwidth or time and would like to see it, here's link to it: photo of Getty Garden Reeds tiff format. You will be prompted to open or download the file so don't be shocked if that happens. Hope you like it.

Canon EOS 20D
18-55mm lens at 35mm
1/15 sec at f/11
ISO 400