Walker Butte

Well, tonight was another night of playing 'catch-up.' These shots are from the last day of May, 2008. I've organized my Picasa web albums by month, and it always feels good to come to the end of another month. I picked out several of these pictures to blog about tonight, but I may not get the whole series uploaded to the web album until tomorrow. Oh well.

All of these pictures in tonights post feature the hill known as Walker Butte. As you can see, we are looking at the East side of the Butte here, with the sun going down on the West side (funny how that works, huh?). You certainly can't tell from any of these pictures, but on the South side of this hill, near the top, is a large letter 'C' which represents the town of Coolidge. If you check this out with Google Earth, you can actually see the 'C' on the Butte. My wife was actually raised in Coolidge.

This first shot is a medium zoom image, showing the haziness of the sun behind the clouds.



Next, I've zoomed way out for a very wide shot that shows a rather tangled mess of contrails. Every once in a while, I just have to ask myself where all these planes are going, anyway?



The next two shots are very similar. The first one is just shortly before the sun had gone completely behind the hill, and in the next one, the sun is gone. I like both of these shots, and I especially like the tiny little Saguaro cactus on the side of the hill. If you compare the shot above to the two below, you can see just what an 18x optical zoom can do. These shots were take using the Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd camera. Compared with a 35 mm film camera and lense, this would be equivalent to a zoom lense with a range of about 18 to 320 mm.





And then, there was the unusual. A little while later, one of the patches of cloud/contrail above the Butte, began to glow in an unusal rectangular shape. You might think that I 'Photo Shopped' this in to this shot, but that is not the case. In fact, I have several shots in this series that shows this interresting shape.



And last night, didn't I mention something about the green sky? I hope that the tiny version of this final picture does this justice, because there are large areas of the sky that are very green indeed.