Backyard wildlife

Anyone who has lived in Tucson for a while is familiar with back yard lizards. Apparently, the Desert Spiny Lizard is the most common of the bunch. I've always called them "alligators" due to their relatively large size and fearlessness. They're also "push-up lizards" to me because they do a defensive pumping posture that looks just like a human doing push-ups. This one was on a friend's back wall and let me get very close. Would have been a great time for a macro lens, but one can't be choosy when a photo op presents itself.

4th Avenue Street Fair

One of our assignments in photography class was to put together a series of panoramic images. The images had to have a minimum of 6 source photos, and there was no maximum. While at the 4th Avenue street fair this past spring, I snapped a series of shots of the Chocolate Iguana while waiting for my friend and her kids to wrap up inside. It turned out to be one of my favorite panoramas ever.



My friend's son is in the red shirt on the left. Then you see the tents of the street fair marching down 4th Ave. My friend and her daughter are in the door of the cafe, and then, on the right side of the building, there's a dove I happened to catch in mid-flight. It's a great little slice of life photo from a very fun outing.

Chihuly glass at the Desert Botanical Garden

I visited the Desert Botanical Garden (in Phoenix, AZ) this past weekend, and came away with almost 200 photos. There's an incredible exhibit there by glass artist Dale Chihuly. He has created amazing forms with colored glass and integrated them into the desert landscape. Some are huge pieces of sculpture and some are small forms which are easy to overlook. I had the good fortune to be there in the late afternoon when the sunlight slanted through and made everything glow. We stayed on after dark and did another circuit of the park to see the glass forms take center stage. Incredible! Here's one of the more subtle pieces:

4th Avenue Street Fair

4th Avenue is known for being a haven of alternative lifestyles and funky shops. You'll always find people sporting dreadlocks, or exotic ethnic clothing, or something outside the norm. These drummers were in one of the first tents we came to - 4th Avenue in a nutshell.

Tucson Festival of Books

I spent most of the day at the Festival of Books, and caught this great balloon artist near the entrance to the children's area.

Sometimes it just works...

I have a new camera, and I've been terribly lax in posting new images. It's amazing going from a point & shoot digital to a shiny, new DSLR, but there's a pretty steep learning curve in the beginning. Luckily, I have quite a few subjects on which to practice. This past weekend, I spent some time chasing the cats around my friend's house. I was focused on one cat when I felt a whisker tickle my arm from behind. I swung the camera over my shoulder, and snapped a picture on the fly. I love the result - a cat candid without any the benefit of the viewfinder or LCD screen - and it worked wonderfully. As my friend said, having a great model helps, too.

Vintage planes

On Saturday, some friends and I visited the Pima Air & Space Museum. I'm not much of a gearhead, but I love museums, and I love the lore and pop culture surrounding aviation, so this was a great trip. Here's one of my favorite planes, an old TWA "Constellation".

Downtown Tucson

Ah, it's good to be back. A friend came in from out of town, so we did the whirlwind tour of the major sites in Tucson. A trip to the Pima Air & Space Museum led us to A-Mountain (Sentinel Peak) at sunset. It was breezy, and tough to take clear shots even with a tripod, but a few came out pretty well. Here's downtown as seen from just below the "A" on the mountain. The big white tents near the highway are for the upcomming Gem & Mineral Show - one of our biggest events of the year.

Why things are quiet around here...

It's National Novel Writing Month and that means I'm both writing a (minimum) 50,000 word novel, and playing Municipal Liaison to over 250 Tucson writers. This is my 7th year doing NaNo and my 6th year as ML, and even though I know what I'm doing, it's still a new experience each year. I'm up to about 44,000 words today, and on-track to finish by Thanksgiving. Trips to Sabino Canyon and places east should resume after that, so I'll have lots of new photos to share. In the meantime, here's one from this year's NaNoWriMo Kick-off Party.

Historic Tucson - The Presidio Site

Tucson began as a walled fort. The wall was square of adobe that featured a lookout tower and military barracks for the soldiers stationed there. The wall was meant to keep out Apache raiders, and to protect the earliest settlers to the area. Most of the wall has been lost to time, but an archaeological excavation in the 1950s revealed one corner of the wall mere inches below the asphalt of a parking lot. About four years ago, the City began plans to build a replica of the corner segment of wall and turn it into a living history museum. Before work began, they brought in Desert Archaeology to find out as much as they could about both the prehistory and history of the site. On December 15, 2005, a groundbreaking ceremony was held at the site to kick off the reconstruction of the Presidio. Staff from Desert Archaeology were on-hand to answer questions and walk people through the archaeological findings. This picture shows how the archaeologists had to work around existing utility poles and such, and also how close the historic and prehistoric remains were to the modern-day surface.

Historic Tucson - Cheyney House

I've been working in historic preservation for almost 8 years now, so I've amassed quite a library of pictures of historic places in and around Tucson. I finally got around to uploading a few to my flickr account, so I'll share some here. This first one is of the Cheyney House after the restoration was completed. This is a house that caught on fire sometime in the mid-1980s and was utterly gutted. It stood vacant for years, charred and crumbling. The neighborhood felt it was an eyesore, and the City was getting ready to demolish it when a couple from Wisconsin found the house, saw the potential in its blackened bones, and decided to do everything in their power to restore it. The restoration cost over a million dollars and was a combination of private and public funding - mostly AZ Heritage Fund money which comes from lottery revenues. The newly restored house is a treasure. It's historically accurate, and now home to people who are passionate about keeping it a viable residence for years to come.

Labor Day from Mount Lemmon

We wanted to get out of town and into nature on Labor Day, so the bf proposed a picnic and we headed up the mountain. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, and the mountain was alive with chasing light and shadow. Heavy monsoon clouds started rolling in around the time we hit Geology Vista, and by the time we got to Ski Valley, the skies opened up and it started pouring rain. We ended up eating our picnic in the car while the windows fogged and rain hammered on the roof. It was surprisingly fun. Once the rain let up a bit, we went to the north parking lot and took a look out over the valley to the back of the mountain. Thanks to the clouds, the valley was dappled with shadows, and it all popped out against the backdrop of our gloomy mountain top. I can't wait to get back up there!

Discovery Place

We had a day to kill in Charlotte, NC and since I'm not into NASCAR, the entertainment options were a bit limited. I was poking around on google and found a science center in uptown Charlotte called Discovery Place. As luck would have it, a touring exhibit of Pompeii artifacts was on display. I'm an archaeologist by training, so I couldn't pass up a chance to see a Pompeii show that wasn't likely to tour to my part of the country.
Unfortunately, it was a rather "meh" display, but Discovery Place had a LOT more to offer. One of the coolest exhibits was the dinosaurs. I particularly like this picture because of the skulls on the wall behind the stegosaurus skeleton. My NaNoWriMo novel last year was about dragons, and several of the skulls reminded me of characters in my novel. I might even go back to write in a few more details after seeing these bones.

Tucson's 4th of July

We had a very delayed fireworks show this year due to a thunderstorm that pounded the downtown area around 7pm. The A Mountain show was pushed back to 10pm, but that just gave us extra time to find the perfect vantage point. We ended up along Granada Avenue, right near El Minuto. Even though my camera's starting to show its age (and does not do well with low-light photography), I brought my gorillapod and figured it was worth a shot. I mounted the pod in a mesquite tree, forgetting that mesquites tend to be frequented by large, biting ants. Ugh. Got some good pictures and some embarassingly bad ones, and ended up with a final count between 12 and 16 ant bites. Whoops!

Fun with architecture

I spent the past weekend in Raleigh and Charlotte, NC. I was there to visit a friend and take in yet another Rush concert (woo!). We spent Monday at Charlotte's Discovery Place science center, and then wandered around uptown so I could search out interesting buildings. One of my favorites was the Hearst Tower. I'm not at all familiar with Charlotte, so I don't know anything about the building, but it instantly reminded me of the Chrysler Building in New York City (my favorite building in the world), so I wasted a lot of battery power snapping pictures of it. Here's a great shot of the ornate entryway.

Central Park, NY

I just got a new laptop, so I've been going through all my old photos and trying to get things organized. I found a small set that missed being uploaded to flickr with the rest of my 2006 trip pictures, and this is one of the missing. It was taken in the rotunda room at the Natural History Museum, looking out over Central Park around 5pm. The weather was pretty warm, but the trees were still mostly bare from winter.

Cat vs. javelina

I've been taking care of a friend's cat, and we had a bit of excitement the other day. A javelina showed up on the porch, seeking refuge from the mid-day sun (and 106+ degree temps!) and the cat got very agitated. Finally, the javelina came over to the porch door to see what was making all the ruckus. Every time the cat thumped against the glass, the javelina's hackles went up. You can see a bit of that here.

Watching for polar bears

What's more fun that going to the zoo as a kid? Going as an adult with kids along. Being able to experience everything through their eyes adds such a rich dimension to the day.

The "kid" here is my friend's 5 year old daughter. We were in a subterranean viewing area to see the polar bears, and one large bear was swimming laps around the pool. She perched on the windowsill in rapt attention for about 15 minutes.

Giraffe tongue!

More from the zoo trip...

We headed over to the giraffe exhibit in time for the 2pm feeding. For $2, you can buy a handful of lettuce and go out onto a special balcony that overlooks the giraffe pen. All three know when it's close to a feeding time and come right up to the balcony to snatch treats out of your hand. I took this shot before the feeding started, but after the giraffes had already gravitated to the walkway. This one was trying to reach some new leaves on a palo verde tree (obviously stripped as far as a giraffe tongue can reach).

The world's largest pigeon

No, I'm not exaggerating :) Here's a resident of one of the Reid Park Zoo's aviarys:




The first thing that struck me about this bird was the fluffy mess of fine feathers on top of its head. It was preening and kept shaking its head so fast that the feathers would blur into a kind of corona. It's about the size of a small turkey and, while shy, came right out onto the pavement when the zookeeper came around with food bowls. It never occurred to me that this might be a pigeon until a friend identified it for me. Now I can't help but see the resemblance. I see hundreds of regular city pigeons around downtown every week - this is just a grossly exaggerated version. Fun to be able to get so close to such an exotic critter.