Arizona.

Last month, my mom traveled down to Scottsdale, AZ to get radiation therapy. During Spring Break, I traveled down to visit and got many great photos while I was there. I haven’t gotten around to posting them until now as I had my SkillsUSA post and my Focus208 posts that had to be turned in first. Anyway, here are the photos.

Flying

Planes are excellent opportunities to take great photos. It just seems like there is great lighting, interesting subjects, and plenty of time. When ever I fly southwest, I have to take a photo of my ginger ale (quite possibly the best drink on a plane) in front of the window. It always looks different, and it is a fun “tradition”. Another shot I like taking is the wing above the landscape. This changes with the land you are flying over, so it always is different. In this photo, it is over Salt Lake City – or at least the mountains surrounding the city.

While flying, I find it interesting to take a photo of the cabin. In the air, everybody is like a drone, just looks straight ahead, almost unmoving for the duration of the flight. I could probably have taken twenty more of these photos and most likely, nothing would have changed.

Cliff Dwellers

While in Arizona, we decided to travel north of Phoenix to go see these fancy cliff dwellings of the late Native American tribe of the area. This is where I got most of my photos of cacti. There really were some amazing plants there — at least to a North Idahoan. Cacti seems to make cool photos.

Once again, here is some cacti photos, you can see the wonderful Arizona blue sky, which is incredibly great to photograph. Everything comes out so blue.

After photographing some cacti, I traveled up the hill to get some shots of the caves, there was some cool stuff up there, as well as more cacti (above). There were some very cool things there.

As you may be able to tell, I am trying out a new watermark, I feel it looks cleaner and all around better. Tell me what you think… if you actually read this far.

These caves were great opportunities for taking photos, they have lots of great areas.

Sunset

One evening, we decided to go out to the desert and get some photos of cacti during sunset. It seems like it goes down so fast there, so there isn’t much time to photos, but I managed to get several good shots though.

Once again, the skies are so blue down there that even in the evening, the it looks so saturated.

The Grand Canyon

While in Arizona, we had to make the mandatory migration to the Grand Canyon. I decided that no photos can demonstrate the massiveness of the hole… but I’ll try.

Above, you can see a photo that I posted earlier of the Grand Canyon, I used it for a Spanish project of Salvador Dalí. I added melting clocks to the photo to imitate the “Persistence of Memory”. You can see the project below.

Once again, here are more great sunsets. The grand canyon is no exception for seeing great sunsets in Arizona.

Here’s a random fact… the far side of the Grand Canyon (the opposing side from which all of my photos were taken) is 1000 feet higher. However, due to the curve of the earth, the other side looks lower. The Grand Canyon and the Salt Flats in SLC are some of the few places where the curve of the earth is visible on ground.

Above you can see some more cool photos that I took. I found this random sploch of ink on the rock (hopefully it was ink…) and I photographed it, you can mildly see the canyon in the bokeh.

Other Photos

Although these do not directly relate to my project, I felt like including them because they are decent portraits that I took while shooting. They really don’t fit into any other categories. I also am posting a photo that I took in the airport of my boarding pass, in hopes of decoding the 2D datamatrix barcode to see what the airport has to say about me, as it is quite obvious that it is more than just a number (2d barcodes can hold a ton of info for the size compared to a regular UPC. Unfortunately I was unable to decode it successfully, as I am not a barcode scanner owned by Southwest Air.

I also hope to post some more of those photos in a later post, one of them including a kendama…

That pretty much concludes this blog post, most likely the longest of mine, with over 35 photos. But before we end this post, here are the contact sheets…

If you happened to read this whole thing, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the photos.

–Scott