Portrait of a Young Woman

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The flash didn’t fire when I did these photos, leaving the image files almost completely black. I pulled up the exposure and made various other adjustments in Photoshop and came out with surprisingly nice images. There is a hint of green in the hair from the under exposed image, otherwise the color came out well. This is one of the advantages to a full-frame sensor.

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Spider Daze

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It’s that time of the year when the garden spiders are building their webs in the flowers and pathways. Last night I moved the hose from one drip system to the other, and felt something crawling on me — it was one of the zipper spiders. It had apparently built its web across the path and I didn’t see it in the low light of dusk. I felt bad that I had inadvertently destroyed her web. I moved her over to some tall grasses and she crawled off me into the grasses where she could build another web. Walking through her web reminded me of an old Far Side comic where a couple of spiders have a web built on the end of a slide and one spider is telling the other “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!” You can see a copy of the comic here: http://blogerinblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/eat-like-kings.jpg.

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Thunderheads

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Thunderheads over the Sandias taken from Hwy 528 just south of Hwy 550.

Thunderheads appear, change and disappear very quickly in the desert southwest. They can produce sudden and heavy rains, high winds, intense lighting storms and hailstorms. But often they form and put on a show, changing into all kinds of shapes, and then evaporate without a sound or drop of precipitation.

The first four photos were taken over a timespan of 10 minutes while driving on Highway 550 to Highway 528 and on to Corrales Road. The Weather Service interrupted the radio to announce the there was heavy rain and flooding on the other side of the Sandias from these thunderheads.

The last photo was taken from our deck where we sit and watch the clouds form and change over the Sandias through the bamboo and cottonwood trees.

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Thunderheads over the Sandias from Corrales Rd. just east of Hwy 528.
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Wider view of thunderheads over the Sandias and stretching down the Rio Grande Valley taken from Hwy 528 just south of Hwy 550.
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Thunderheads over the Sandias from Hwy 550 west of Hwy 528.
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Thunderheads as seen from our deck.