With this set of pictures I’m breaking away with the tradition to only publish artistic photos that are suitable, in my opinion, to be printed and hung on a wall somewhere. As it turns out, I do take regular shots, too, but typically only show them to friends at parties.

The Mamas and the Papas may be all about California, but I like to visit Arizona. Don’t know why, maybe it’s a break from the constant humidity in Virginia, maybe it’s all the cactus or, perhaps, it’s because I haven’t been to New Mexico yet. In any case, these are a few spring Arizona shots to balance out the pretty nasty Virginia fall that we are having here.

The color saturation on these shots isn’t really bumped up as it may seem to a casual onlooker. The sky is really this deep blue and the yellow flowers are really this vibrant and even the rocks are, in fact, this yellow — it’s some kind of minerals plus a bunch of little blooming plants.

I think you can tell a lot about a city by its botanical garden. So, every time I go to a new place, I like to visit the local botanical exhibits. The shot below is of the main building in Desert Botanical Garden in Scottsdale, AZ. Or the impression that I got from it — this is 9 or so frames combined via the camera’s multiple exposure mode.

About a half of these shots are HDR. Because of the high contrast in full sun, it’s very hard to shoot, but also I just wanted to play around with HDR. I definitely am not a big fan of the overprocessed look that a typical HDR photo online has and I didn’t think the look would work with these shots, so I mainly used the technique to make the shooting job easier.

As it turns out, though, I didn’t read the tutorial very attentively, so instead of doing +/- 2EV shots when bracketing, I was doing +/-1. In the end I still think the result is acceptable, but I suppose it could have been better. Either that or I just need to play more with Photomatix and learn to use it better.