The Vulture Mountains are a twenty-nine-mile long collection of volcanic hills south of Wickenburg. The Hassayampa River runs along the range’s eastern boundary and the mountains taper off to the west. From our Congress home, two peaks rise out of the low mounds on our southern horizon: Vulture Peak’s rounded knob is to the left and the sloping top of Black Butte is on the right. Reminding me of a doorstop or a fallen cake, Black Butte is the subject of this week’s photo.
Black Butte – With its distinctive sloping top, Black Butte marks the western boundary of the Vulture Mountain Range.
The slanting top of Black Butte first caught my attention while I was still working. I drove the forty mile trip from Wintersburg to Congress on the Vulture Mine Road and the butte marked the place where the road turns north. I thought that its shape was the kind of thing you’d see in old western movie backgrounds. I knew that I would use it as a subject some time. A couple of weeks ago while I was shooting in Aguila, there it was waiting for me bathed in late afternoon light.
You can see the larger version on my Website by clicking Here. I hope you enjoy viewing it and I’d love to hear your comments below.
We’re still hanging in Aguila for the new Photo of the Week. Although I drove twenty-five miles to the little town because I had wanted to shoot a specific sign, I then poked around town to see what else I could photograph, and I found the number one reason—if there is such a thing—to visit Aguila. Here’s my shot of the natural window in the hills south of town formed by eagle-head-shaped rocks. Aguila is the Spanish word for eagle; hence, you have the town’s name source.
Eagle Eye Window – Rocks form this window in the shape of an eagle’s head and is in the hills south of Aguila, Arizona.
I’m sure there’s a way to climb up to the window because I’ve seen people there. I didn’t take the time to find a way on this trip, but I saw on Google Maps that there was a trail from the cemetery south of town. As I said last week, there is a good view from the window along US Highway 60 by the working fields of Centennial Ranches. Even a moderate telephoto lens will bring the Eagle Eye closer.
I followed dirt roads between the fields to get closer for this shot. They had street signs, so I assumed the roads were public. It was late in the afternoon when I snapped this, and the beautiful streaky clouds were beginning to get color. I should have waited for sunset, but I wanted to get to another scene that I saw along the trip (which was a bust). You can see the larger version on my Website – Here. I hope you enjoy viewing it. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.
Motel Aguila – A faded sign marks the location of a motel on US 60 in Aguila Arizona.
This week’s new picture I call Motel Aguila, and it’s another faded motel sign for my collection. Located as you would expect, in Aguila—a farming town some twenty miles west of Wickenburg. It’s also across the street from last week’s shot, which is how I spotted it. The paint on this sign is so faded that I don’t see a business name, and there’s only a whisper of letters left to show it as a motel.
As the sign suggests, there is no longer a functioning motel here. The buildings seem to be converted to apartments sheltering migrant farm workers. With less than a thousand permanent residents, there aren’t enough people to work the melon and lettuce fields surrounding the hamlet. The workers have to sleep somewhere and I suppose an old motel is better than the improvised lean-to sheds I’ve seen elsewhere.
Aguila isn’t a destination. There’s a café, gas station, a Dollar General store, and that’s about all. In 1973, Interstate 10 diverted traffic twenty-five miles south, so there isn’t a motel to stay at even if you wanted to. Besides, the only thing to see here is the eagle-eye window in the hills south of town and that’s a fifteen-minute investment along the side of the road (I’ll talk more about the eagle-eye next week).
You can see the larger version on here on my website. I hope you enjoy viewing it and tell me what you think.
“Now for something completely different,” if you didn’t already know, that’s a quote from Monty Python and it’s relevant to today’s post. I’m adding a feature to my blog that I think you’ll like. Since I switched from a monthly newsletter to this blog, I don’t have to post my new images on a monthly schedule. Consequently, I’ve been adding new ones each week and that’s the pace that I like, so I’m going to also write a companion blog post to announce those pictures. When I was doing that in the newsletter it was successful and I hope it works well here on the blog.
Palm Shadow-The the clapboard side of the Robson Honey Warehouse frames a palm tree’s shadow in Aguila Arizona.
With that in mind, let me tell you about this week’s photo. Over the weekend, I got up enough ambition to load my camera and go out shooting. I wanted to get a shot of the Saguaro Motel sign in Aguila—the little farming community west of Wickenburg on US Highway 60. The sign fits into my collection of old motel signs but after researching the story of Robson’s Mining World I wrote last month, I found out that the Robson family owned the motel and acquired their wealth by selling bee pollen as a miracle cure-all. That fact fits right in with the January photo series of the ghost town. The sign’s not all that spectacular but a shot of it and the accompanying cactus is. Unfortunately, they’re behind a locked chain link fence that ruins the shot, so I’ll have to go back and get permission to get inside the fence.
While I was there, I spotted this image next door. I named the shot Palm Shadow, and it is the shadow of a palm tree cast on the white clapboard side of the Robson Honey warehouse. The building’s green trim serves as a frame for the found wall-art and I included the afore-mentioned fence to give the image depth. It’s a scene that I probably would have missed had I not stopped for my original idea. You can see the larger version here. I hope you like it.
Some would call me a brave man. Foolish; maybe, but I’m not brave. You see, Queen Anne asked me to wake her at 5:00 am so she could see the Super-Blue-Blood moon this morning. It was another 100-year event that she didn’t want to miss. It seems to me that these once-in-a-life things happen often.
Super-Blue-Blood Moon – Another once in a lifetime event that we enjoyed on our walk this morning.
At the stroke of five, I did my duty by cracking the bedroom door and tossing a shoe in. When I didn’t hear bear growling, I entered and announced, “It’s started,” then I returned to my computer. Almost immediately, she was at my office door with her jacket on. “A walk? You want to go for our walk now?” I asked.
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
I put on my shoes and grabbed my coat and flashlight and we set off for our morning lap around the park. Venus was high in the east and Scorpio was rising out of the glow of the Phoenix lights. By this time, the moon already had a good bite out of the top as it began to enter earth’s shadow. As we walked, we watched the illuminated section shrink. It takes us about forty-five minutes to complete the two-mile trip and in the dark, I would shine the light before us checking for vermin. It was interesting to see how much light pollution our little community added with many LED ropes placed under trailers being the biggest culprit. They’re supposed to keep rodents from chewing the trailer’s exposed wiring, but I think their effectiveness is suspect.
By the time we got home the moon was only a red glow in the black sky. Rightly named the blood moon, I can see how our ancestors would have feared its omen. Anne grabbed a couple of lap blankets and me, a cup of coffee from the house. We pulled chairs out to the edge of our rear deck and watched while listening to the hoot of a great horned owl coming from nearby trees. We wanted to watch the moon emerge from the shadow, but it lost a race with dawn and to soon disappeared into the trees along the horizon. After it disappeared, we went inside and made breakfast so we could see instant replays on the morning news. All in all, it wasn’t a shabby way to start the day.
The Wickenburg Art Club photo classes have started and have brought some surprises that we hadn’t anticipated. We had more attendees than we expected. Over twenty people have shown up each week and they’re asking questions and fully participating. The other thing that surprised me was how many people want to learn how to use the camera on their smartphone. Stan Strange—our resident iPhone expert—conducted the phone class and he was surprised that in his session Android devices outnumbered the Apple phones three to one.
Since Stan didn’t have a lot of experience with the Android Operating System, I decided to do a little research to help out and because I’m ignorant about smart-phones I had to learn the basics. For me, that means getting the images out of the phone and into a computer so you can do editing on an adult size screen. With my old-guy eyes, I can’t see anything on those tiny phone screens. Besides, although I don’t own a smartphone—or any cell phone for that matter—Queen Anne does and she’s collected enough stuff in the last year that she was out of storage space, so we killed a couple of birds using one stick.
Android USB Configuration – Once you connect your phone and computer, you’ll need to root around in your configurations so the phone will allow files to be transferred.
Having a computer background, I foolishly thought that all that I needed to do was to connect the phone and computer with a USB cable, but when I did that, I got a message in the file window saying, “This folder is empty.” What I didn’t know is that the phone has to be set up to talk with the computer. Anne’s phone was configured so the USB port could only be used for charging. This is an easy fix. While the phone is connected to the computer via USB cable, touch and hold the area at the screen’s top—where the time and battery icons are—then drag down toward the screen’s center. There should be a box labeled “USB Configuration.” If you tap on that banner, it will open an applet that exposes the settings to configure the port. For picture transfers, you want to select: “Transferring Media Files” Once you select that option the phone will expose the phone’s files to the computer. Now in Windows Explorer (if you’re using a Mac computer, you’ll need to get specific instructions elsewhere, but they’re generally the same) your phone’s data should show up (either as a phone or a storage device) as a new drive letter and when you open it you will see an item that says “Internal Storage” or something like that. Once you open that item by double-clicking it, there will be a display of the various folders inside.
Internal Storage – When properly connected, the phone’s internal storage is visible using Windows Explorer.
By consensus, camera manufacturers store images in the DCIM folder, either at the root level or, as in Anne’s phone, a sub-folder named Camera. Once you’ve found your images you are ready to copy or move them to your computer. Unless you have created a specific folder for holding your transfers, you can copy or move your photos from the phone to the computer’s Pictures file you can see in the left frame. You can either drag each image or manually copy and paste if that’s your preference.
App Folders – In the phone’s Internal Storage are the application folders. By consensus, camera manufacturers store images in the DCIM folder.
If you only shoot a couple of pictures a month, keeping your images in the Pictures directory will work, but if you’re like me and you’re shooting hundreds or thousands of photos a year, you may want to consider a better file strategy. That’s a topic that I’ll talk about in my next photo tip installment.
Wenden Sunset – Wispy clouds illuminated by the setting sun near Wenden, Arizona
Because I’m over sixty, I have to get my Arizona driver’s license renewed every five years. Arizona licenses don’t otherwise expire until you reach that age. After sixty, you have to prove that you can still read by taking an eye exam. It’s another example of geezer discrimination. The list of old person bias is long, but I’m not here to complain about that—I have other things on my mind.
On the plus side, there are perks to being grey-haired. We get to wear slacks up to our nipples, we wear white belts any time of the year, we’re allowed to wear black socks with sandals, and we can spend every day on a golf course. Since I don’t play golf, I compensate by sitting around the house whiling-away my time with my idle brain thinking about completely useless crap. Because I do that, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a couple of brain worms get stuck in there, so I need to run them by you and try to drain the swamp to make room for new useless crap.
The worms crawled in after I wrote a post about light and photography (this one) in which I explained that the sun’s light was more pleasing in the early morning and evenings because of the long shadows and the sun’s warmer colors. What I failed to mention was that the morning colors are not exactly the same as sunset’s. Although the color gets warmer because the sun’s rays travel further through the atmosphere then they do at noon; the mornings are yellowish while sunsets are warmer—more orange. I’m not the only one who has noticed this phenomenon as I’ve read other photographer’s accounts on the subject. Since the atmosphere is the same thickness at each horizon, what causes this apparent color shift?
Well … the time I watched PBS, I saw a show about some Einstein guy and his so-called Relativity Theory, so I made up my answer based on the Doppler effect—like how the sound of a train changes pitch as it passes. My explanation is that since the earth rotates on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour, the sun’s light waves are compressed at sunrise relative to sunset. That’s because you’re moving toward the light in the morning and away from it in the evening. The color of the compressed waves shifts infinitesimally bluer and the stretched light waves are redder. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I was perfectly happy keeping my belief a secret until recently.
Another way I waste my non-golfing time is sitting in my Barkalounger 6000 bingeing on Netflix. The newest show we’ve been watching is Travelers. In the show, Will—of Will and Grace, who is suddenly straight—is part of a group of people who travel back in time to change events that eventually lead to the demise of civilization. The show has moral overtones that deal with artificial intelligence and religion that I don’t want to go into now, but its entertaining Sci-Fi.
At the same time, every Wednesday, Queen Anne and her girlfriends get together and watch a show called Outlander and it also has a time travel plot. I really believe they watch it to see the hunk they drool over, but in Outlander, the heroine jumps a couple of centuries somewhere in Scotland. I haven’t watched it and what I know comes from Anne’s babbling when she comes home all flushed and frisky. I have to feign headaches.
Here’s what’s been keeping me awake at nights. Time travel is not just impractical, it’s impossible, and my reasoning doesn’t even involve the Marty Fly Conundrum—dating your own mother. I’m a skeptic solely on the time/space aspects of such travel and I’m surprised someone else hasn’t brought this up before.
So, you’re a hot shoe because you speed down the Interstate at 85 miles an hour, or even better, maybe you’re a jet jockey who flies at the speed of sound. Big deal, I got you beat sitting in my lounge char spinning around the world at 1,000 miles an hour. Think about that: We constantly move faster than the speed of sound. That means that if you got into your time machine and went back just one hour, you’d wind up an hour ago but in a different time zone. That’s only the beginning. While we’re on this supersonic merry-go-round, we’re also zooming around the sun at 65,600 miles an hour. Imagine setting your way-back machine for one hour. You’d pop out somewhere on the orbital path sixty-thousand miles in front of the planet, and you’d better move because you’re about to become a bug on earth’s windshield when it catches up to you in precisely sixty minutes. It gets better. Our solar system is on one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms that orbit the galactic center at 450,000 miles each hour. And if that wasn’t enough, consider this: The Milky Way is moving away from the Local Void each hour by 1.3 million miles. So far, our total speed is only 0.19% of the speed of light so at least we aren’t close to breaking that speed limit, but we don’t know if our universe is stationary or floating through some cosmic Jell-O.
What I’m getting at with these staggering speeds is that to travel in time, you would need to plot and navigate back to a point somewhere in the Cosmos that you were an hour ago and it’s already more than a million miles away. Your calculations would need to be accurate with a precision beyond any computer that we have … and let me remind you how late your last flight arrived. When you think about this complexity, keep in mind how fast your gas gauge moves when your Chevy pickup speeds down the highway. The amount of energy required to instantaneously travel such a vast distance doesn’t exist. As Kelli Bundy said, “The mind wobbles.” I’ll add, “Get over it. It can’t be done.”
Oh, what a relief! I feel so much better now that I got that off my chest. Maybe now I can get some sleep. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my cheeseburger and I are going to jump into bed quickly before Anne gets home from her girls-night-out demanding that I dress up in the kilt she bought for me.
