Piccatoriano

After being without a functional computer for entirely too long, I’m finally going back through some of my old (and not-so-old) photos. These are unabashedly edited in Photoshop, for the most part. A couple are resized and otherwise straight from the camera.

Kind as Dangerspouse is in praising my photos, I’m not a professional photographer, nor even close.

I am, however, an enthusiastic one, and one who loves playing with the outcome.

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This is a recent photo. Great art? Nope. Unapologetically a snapshot. Edited for size, to remove the F-word from the back of the chair, and to swap color for sepia. I didn’t even crop this one. I didn’t remove the F word to censor the graffiti. It was an aesthetic choice, to make the chair more distinct.

This local spot was known as The Domes.

Yes, I know this is only one structure, and from the angle through the doorway doesn’t look very dome-like.

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There were in fact a whole bunch of domes, all in the same condition – which is to say, dilapidated. They were built in the early 1980s, with the intent to build computers onsite. The original plans fell through before they were completed and the property sat empty through the ensuing decades.

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G had been bugging me to go, so we drove out a couple of weekends ago. There was no way to drive onsite, and technically you weren’t supposed to walk in, either. However, G and a good dozen more people ignored the No Trespassing signs to go in and take pictures. It was so common to go in, the location was mentioned on sites like TripAdvisor and Atlas Obscura.

I took photos from the car window. G joked at the time, saying now we could say we’d been there, with photos to prove it, and we didn’t need to go back.

As it worked out, nobody’s going back. Bulldozers went in Monday of this week and flattened everything, by court order. We didn’t know at the time, but we just skated in under the proverbial wire.

The next few photos are still taken close to home, driving a slightly different direction from where we live.

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I typically use sepia, but these wild daisies and green fence post decreed a different background. I tried it both ways and settled on the indigo.

All the pictures on this entry were taken the same weekend we visited the Domes, at the end of December.

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This abandoned shack is also from nearby, on the neighboring Native American reservation. I doctored this photo, doing my best to replicate the effect of an older camera. I’m debating whether to offer framed prints of some of my better shots. I’m happy with my Photoshop skills, if not my photography prowess!

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It’s obviously winter here, depite the lack of snow. It was also a rainy day so everything was a bit dark, dreary, and cool. We loved every minute of it.

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We drove way out into the middle of nowhere. It was magnificent.

We couldn’t go spelunking – for a number of reasons – but we did spot several caves, including this bigger one. This one appeared to go a fair distance back. Most of them were little more than shallow indentations.

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It was hard to gauge size from the car. Nearly as I can tell, the top of the cave entrance is probably 20 feet high or more.

There was at least one natural arch in the area. Unfortunately it didn’t photograph well. G walked up the hill to see if he could get a better angle. He said it was clear people were or had been inside, so he turned around and walked back to the car, and we moved to a safe distance. In some of these middle-of-nowhere spots, the most dangerous thing you can encounter are smugglers – of illegal aliens, of drugs, of weapons, etc.

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From other angles it was easier to see this is a true arch. Unfortunately, none of the angles were from places I could stop the car to take pictures.

It was unintentional to capture these saguaro in silhouette, but the longer I looked at them, the more I liked them. In fact, G said he thinks this is the best of the bunch – and other than resizing and cropping, it’s unedited.

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I try not to go nuts with cactus and mountain photos. Both are so common here it’s tougher to avoid them than to snap them. But this angle and moody lighting worked in my favor. This is the view just a few miles from where we live, along Indian Road 15.

4 thoughts on “Piccatoriano”

  1. Niiiice set! I think your top photo is excellent, and that’s despite the erasure of my favorite word (good call taking it out). I particularly like the wild daisy picture, as complimentary colors always look so good together, and you also composed this shot quite nicely. Great job all the way around, Young Glasshoppa!

    Reply
    • Thank you. 🙂 The first photo is the only angle from the car where the view wasn’t thick with overgrown brush. I’m happy overall with the outcomes of this shoot. I didn’t even open most of the pictures from this shoot, and bypassed a lot I did open – not because I thought they were terrible or even that I didn’t like them; only I was looking for a narrow set of parameters for this set, including keeping everything distinct.

      Glad you liked the color option with the daisy picture. Maybe I should’ve leaned more into a purple hue – which is technically complimentary to yellow, and yellow-green-purple is one of my favorite color combos anyway, in the right hues. Now I gotta go play, lol

      Reply

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