Palo Duro II

You might have guessed that I wasn't finished with my earlier Paolo Duro Canyon post. The HDR images were missing. Well, here's a few sets I managed to come up with for a little post-processing.

When I was planning this trip, I intended to use my time shooting bracketed exposures to feed my HDR habit. As it turned out, however, my patience failed me. Combining exposure bracketing and exposure compensation should have given me a wide range of exposures for each set. Instead, with the gusty winds at the Canyon rim, the fact that I couldn't find my glasses to read the camera settings, and my being antsy after the boring drive across North Texas, I took a couple of sets, squinted at the settings, and still thought my camera was misbehaving. I said, "the hell with that", stowed the G6 in the car and used the 10D the rest of the day.

So, it turns out that the first set I took overlooking the Canyon from the visitor center worked out just fine, as did the second and third. But there wasn't enough difference in the three sets to use all three. So here's the first set.

The rest of these were HDR'd by manipulating a single shot to get overexposed and underexposed companion shots to make the set. It doesn't always work, but it's not terrible most of the time. This shot, you can see, was taken in the same direction from the same end of the Canyon as the first one, but about halfway down to the Canyon floor.

I realized about halfway through the afternoon that I had locked my auto-focus in the center of the frame. Since I couldn't remember offhand how to let the auto-focus "do its thing", several of these shots are marred by parts of the image being out of focus. This usually happens when I set the camera to do something specific for a given shot, and don't set everything back to normal before putting the camera away. I used to be patient and take care of all these things as I went along. Now I just get annoyed, and everything takes much longer to do.

The shots immediately above and below are of the same "feature". In a couple thousand more years, that cliff will be topped by a hoodoo, like you'd see in Bryce Canyon. For right now, I can't figure out what I'd call it.

This just your run-of-the-mill prickly pear. I just wanted to see if the spines would be as impressive in the picture as they were in real life. I'm here to tell you that every one of those spines is just as sharp as it looks. It hurts just looking at the picture. . .