Sundown at the Mining Camp Restaurant

I've got a lot of pictures to talk about tonight. But, first, I have an urgent question -- Does anybody know what this railroad building is (or used to be)? I've been driving by it for the last couple of years, and ever since I began taking sunset photos, I've been meaning to stop and shoot some pictures of this thing. I thought that it might be an interesting subject. But, you know how it goes -- when you are driving down the road, there is always somewhere more important that you need to be.

However, on this given night, when I was driving by, it was getting near sundown, so I finally forced myself to pullover and investigate. The more I looked at it, the more puzzled I became. I'd guess that it is about 25 to 30 feet in diameter, and about 30 or more feet tall. It has a doorway and a couple of windows. The windows have bars in them. Whatever used to installed in the middle of the floor is long gone.

There are apparently two chambers, one above the other. When I stood inside the lower chamber and looked at the roof, I could see that it is about at the halfway-up point. You can see a ring around the outside of the building where the division is located. What I found to be the strangest is that the roof of the lower chamber is domed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get to the upper chamber to see what it contained.

Ok, what is this thing?



This next shot shows the doorway, and to the right you can see one of the windows.



OK, enough of that. Now, on to the the Mining Camp Restaurant. This is a very famous destination here in the Phoenix area. It is nestled in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains. Since I moved to the Phoenix valley in 1967, and heard about this restaurant ever since I arrived, I just figured that it had always existed! Ha! The restaurant opened in 1961.

The strange thing is that it's now 42 years later, and I still had never been there. I'd always heard great things about the food and atmosphere, and always wanted to go, but just never seemed to make it. It's kind of like living in New York City but never having seen the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, or living in Arizona and never having seen the Grand Canyon. (Just kidding, of course I've seen the Grand Canyon. I've even hiked to the bottom of it a couple of times.)

My wife, Paula, and I decided that it was time to have dinner with Dave & Ann, friends of ours that we hadn't seen in a while. It just so happens that they were planning on spending a few nights in Apache Junction, which is located sort of at the mid-point between the places where be live. So, we thought we would eat in Apache Junction. But, where?? Well, of course, where else but the Mining Camp Restaurant. And, it's funny how dinner time happens somewhere near the time that the sun goes down.

After we had finished eating, and the girls continued talking about family, etc., Dave and I excused ourselves and escaped outside just before sunset. Dave has done a lot of professional photography and sold a lot of his pictures. Imagine this, though -- I was the only one to bring a camera. (I almost never go anywhere without my camera.) So, as Dave and I were talking, and he was giving me some very useful hints, I started taking pictures.

These first two shots show what meets you right outside the restaurant's entrance. Notice the Superstition Mountains in the immediate background?





And, here is to show you that we all observe the world around us differently. Dave asked if I would mind if he took a couple of shots with my camera. Here are a couple of the shot that he took. Notice that while I was looking at buildings, mountains, and eventually the setting sun, Dave focused in on something completely different -- something that I hadn't even seen!!

Take a look at the wagon wheels. There is something about wheels these that caught Dave's interest.



And here is probably the best shot of the whole night. There is some real artistic flare in this shot!! I just love it. Thanks, Dave!!



About this time, I looked up and saw the following. I usually keep track of the sun's and the moon's rise and set times. I knew that a near-full moon was going to be rising on this night, but in the excitement, had completely forgotten. So, I grabbed the camera and shot some moon shots. (Does that make sense?)



Yep, that's the moon rising right over the Superstition Mountains.



But, then of course, the sun was going down, and I was obligated to take some sunset pictures. Here is a view through a cactus.



And here is a view over the mountains to the west.



By the way, you can learn more about this famous restaurant at their web site at:
www.miningcamprestaurant.com.

Experiment With a Cell Phone Camera

Last night - no clouds - just orange! But, even then, I'm usually so intently focused on taking my sunset pictures, running around looking for the perfect composition, and racing the clock - since the whole thing really only lasts a few minutes - that I don't think of anything else.

I've been wondering just what I'd do if the sun was going down and I didn't have a camera with me. But, then it dawned on me that I always have my cell phone with me. I've been wanting to see how good a job my cell phone could do with a sunset, but, like I said, I'm usually too busy trying to take good pictures, to spend some of the available time taking shots with just a cell phone.

I have a new cell phone, a Motorola Hint, that has a 2-M pixel camera built in. It can take some very nice pictures of normal stuff, but I hadn't yet tried aiming it at the sun. So, since last night was just another one of those plain orange things, I'd decided to give it a go.

This first shot is how things looked with the Fujifilm camera (well, of course I had it with me - I always do!!). Like I said, it was just another plain orange sunset ...



Now, here is the same thing taken with the Hint. I notice several differences; The sky is more blue. The sky is brighter. The sun is a brighter spot.



More blue - because the phone camera's white balance was set to 'auto.' When I am shooting sunsets with my normal cameras, I set their white balance settings to 'sunset' or 'shade,' which enhances the reds. Therefore, the Fujifilm camera makes the sky look more purple, and the Hint makes it more blue.

Brighter - I'm just guessing here, that there are two things working here. One, the metering in the phone camera is full averaging, which, when shooting a very bright spot, like the sun (!!), causes the the bright spot to be overexposed, and the rest of the shot to be brighter. And two, perhaps the phone camera simply can't shoot fast enough to handle shooting the sun!

And that gets us to this morning. When I got up I looked out and saw clouds!!! So, I grabbed the Canon and went running. Here a couple of these shots.

Horray, June Has Begun!

Well, OK, June hasn't really begun yet. But, at least I'm done with the uploading of the May 2008 photos to my Picasa web albums. And, I've started going through the June pictures. And, June really started off with a very firey sky. June 1, 2008 was a very great night.

This first picture is a medium zoom shot, nicely showing the friendly Saguaro.



The second shot, is a wide shot, showing what the sky looked like before the sun went down. It was a very pretty sky.



But, here is what you could see if you zoomed in for a closer look at the clouds as the sun was disappearing below the horizon. The details in the clouds are really neat. But, there are far better pictures still to come from this night. However, I'm going to leave it at this for tonight's posting, because when I re-examined the pictures from this June night, I was reminded of just how great the night was. And, there are a lot more photos to describe and upload.

When the Wind Blows, It Gets Dusty!

This morning, on my way in to town for work, I stopped to take some picture of some Palo Verde trees. This being the time of year when they bloom, they become covered with tiny yellow blossoms. In the early morning light, they are just stunning. But first, I took a couple of shots of a yellow bush, and noticed the little winged guy shown here. So, I thought I'd give the macro mode a whirl. The shot turned out better than I expected.

I know that this has nothing to do with sunrises, but here's the little bee ...



And then I took several shots of the Palo Verde trees. You can see here just why I am so attracted to them in the morning light.



And that gets us to tonight. As I was leaving town, to begin my long trek back home, I realized that we had a lot of wind. The weather reports had been predicting this for the last couple of days. And, wind means at least one thing -- dust!!!

We didn't have a 'dust storm' -- and we here in the desert understand what a dust storm really is -- we just had dust. And dust means interesting sunsets. And that made me hopeful. In the shot below, the sun is just a big hazy bright spot. At this point in time I still didn't know that we had any clouds. Does it look like there are any clouds to you?



In this next shot, as the sun continued on its way down, I realized that there were a few clouds just above the horizon.



I've commented on this before, but as the sun goes lower, it begins to take on its normal appearance as a clearly defined circle again, as opposed to the hazy spot seen above.



Here is a shot that I think I like, with just half of the sun peeking around the cactus. And, with so much dust in the air, the sun is not overwhelmingly bright.



And, finally, the sun is beginning to disappear behind the final bank of clouds.

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.

Another Great (Old) Night - and Green Sky

You know, if I keep this up, it's not impossible that I could actually catch up in uploading pictures to my web albums. That means, that tonight, again, I didn't go out to capture new shots.

The pictures that I uploaded to Picasaweb tonight, were taken on May 30, 2008. As you can see in this first shot, there were a few nice clouds down low. But, sometimes, what you don't see, is that there lots of barely visible clouds up higher in the sky. When the sun is still bright, they just don't show up very well. This is how the night began ...



The lower the sun went, the more visible the higher clouds became. In this miniature version of this next shot, you have to look kind of hard to locate the Saguaro cactus. It's much more obvious in my full-sized original of the picture.

Also, notice up higher on the right side of the shot is a bright spot. These show up quite frequently when there is a very bright spot in the opposite corner of the shot- you know, sort of like the sun! They are refractions caused by the optics in the lense. (At least, that's what I think they are.)



These next two shots have always struck me as a little odd. I really enjoy the colors in the sky. But, I was playing around hiding the sun directly behind the top of a small Saguaro. They are just a little different. At least, there is the full sized Saguaro in the background. What do you think -- does the little round cactus add anything for you?





In the next shot I've moved over to place the sun back behind the full sized cactus again. But, I'm far enough from the cactus that it barely bigger than the sun. When I first started taking sunset photos, I really liked the zoomed-in, close-up shots. But the more I do this, the more the bigger, zoomed-out images are really growing on me. I think that it is important, however, to keep something in the shot to creat a point of interest -- like the tiny little cactus in front of the sun.



Now, in this next shot, quite the opposite of the wide angle shot above, here is what the sky and setting sun look like when really zoomed in. It really amazes me just how much the sky can look all uniform and red (or orange).



Well, back to the wide shot again. Remember that I said at the beginning of this post that I didn't know there were any clouds up high in the sky. Well, about the time of this next shot, the sun had gone below the horizon, and these higher-up clouds were starting to glow.



And, a while later, the sky was beautiful.



And, finally, for this last shot, until after I started taking sunset pictures, I'd never seen a green sky. Once I noticed the green in some of my pictures, I thought that this must be some anomoly of the camera. Surely, the sky couldn't really look green???

But, after I had seen this in lots of shots, I finally started paying attention while actually taking the pictures. And, sure enough, the green really is there!!! It seems to show up after the sky starts getting darker, and lives down low, near the horizon. If you don't believe me, go outside and look for yourself!

Sky Shadows!

Again, I'm going to talk about pictures from a long time ago. Tonight's sunset was just one of those 'orange' things. Plus, I'd spent the day in the attic running some new wires. I came down in time to check the sky, and decided I was too hot and tired to go out for new pictures.

As opposed to what I mentioned in my last post, I don't really remember this particular night, which was May 23, 2008. But, I do remember the photos because I look at them often. And, I really like the shadows in the sky that the clouds cast after the sun goes down behind them. This is an indication that there is a lot of 'stuff' in the air. The tags that I put in my pictures after I take them, told me that the night that I took these pictures followed about two days of winds and rain.

I think that in my last post I also said that I really like those pictures where the sun is partly hiding directly behind the clouds. And this series of shots shows this situation at its finest. Even in this first shot, you can already see that the sky-shadows are beginning to happen.



Here is wider shot. Even though there aren't very many clouds in the sky, they sure are positioned wonderfully.



Now, in this next shot, instead of being a wide shot, I've zoomed in a great deal, directly on the sun. I love shots like this where the circle of the sun is clearly visible behind the clouds. And, in this shot, I'm really pleased with the ground reference still being visible. By the way, this hill, which shows up in a lot of my photos, is Walker Butte, which is located West of Florence and North of Coolidge.



Next, the sun has gone down below the first set of clouds, and is beginning to go down behind the second set of clouds. And this causes the first set of clouds to begin casting sky-shadows.



Here is a closer look at those shadows. I think that this shot is just a great example of this kind of shadow.



And finally, here is a wide shot again.