Saguaro Sunset

I began my last full day in Tucson hiking the trails near the place where I stayed. There seemed to be public hiking trails every where around there and it was an easy walk from the door of my room. I took a few photos along the way, but nothing really stood out to me as notable. The only interesting thing I saw was a herd of deer that came down the hill along side the trail. They didn’t seem to be all that worried about me though I did get the occasional curious look. They mainly just browsed along side the trail while I walked along. In order to keep this morning’s hike light, of course I left my nice long 100-400mm lens in the hotel room on the one hike on which I saw significant wildlife. So, what I have was taken with a light-weight 24-200mm lens.

Later on in the day I went back out to Saguaro National Park West and explored a trail that I hadn’t taken the day before. It was mostly dirt roads and some areas were closed but I eventually made it out to a place call Ez-Kim-In-Zin picnic area and parked there. I wandered around on a mostly flat trail through a dry wash hoping to see some wildlife. About the best I found was a bunch of chipmunks scurrying around in the dry creek bed. They had quite a network of holes in the sand and I watched them dart into one and eventually come out another. I also saw a gila woodpecker at a hole high up on a Saguaro but I was a bit too far away to get a good image.

The sky had a lot of high clouds as the afternoon got late and that often means a beautiful sunset. So, I hung out at the CCC overlook gazebo near the parking area and waited to see what would develop. There were several other people there, but mysteriously they all gave up several minutes before sunset and drove away leaving just me and a bunch of desert mice to watch the horizon.

As I’d hoped, a few minutes after the sunset the high clouds began to light up with yellows and oranges, fading to light magenta. It was so colorful I almost didn’t know what to do, but fortunately I had planned out a couple of shots that I hoped would work before the sun set. In the photo below, an ocotillo and some wildflowers hold down the foreground with the colored clouds over the desert mountains in the distance.

Sunset at Saguaro National Park

The above and below images are HDR merges in which five images of varying exposure are combined in Lightroom. It is easy to take these shots with a modern camera as there is usually a bracketing function. I set my camera up to take 5 exposures, with a shots at -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2 exposure compensation. I also set the shutter release to high-speed continuous shooting so the camera will take a burst of 5 images at different exposure when you hold down the shutter button. Lightroom combines the dark frames with the properly exposed sky and the bright frames with the properly exposed landscape and you get an image with a lot more dynamic range to edit.

Editing is the tough part as you can really make the colors and contrast exaggerated and end up with a cartoonish looking image. I tried to keep that under control and get an image that looked realistic, perhaps with some saturation of the sky colors. I also did a lot of work on the shadows of the distant hills to try to give the image some depth. And lastly, I set my monitor to half brightness to decide how bright the image is when I export it. I hope it looks good on your screen, it’s really hard to know how people will see it as well all have different screens.

Sunset at Saguaro National Park

The above image is another take avoiding that ocotillo. The ocotillo was actually invading the image from the left side and I erased it in Photoshop so you would just have the wildflowers and cactus in the landscape. Hope you like the images. Thanks for reading.

24 thoughts on “Saguaro Sunset”

  1. A sunset definitely worth waiting for. Truly beautiful! So glad that you know what you are doing when you take pictures, so that we can benefit from it. 🙂 I agree that photoshopping out the ocotillo does enhance the second photo more. I think the colors give the perfect warm feeling of Aww…ness when looking at it. Another photo that I would say is definitely frameable.

    Don’t you wish you knew what the deer were thinking when looking at you. LOL! The woodpecker is small, but still a good image of it. One can tell what it is. It would look like just a dot with my camera.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Thanks, I enjoyed the sunset with the mice and bugs. All the mice around the shelter did have me thinking about rattlesnakes, but I didn’t see or hear one. I will leave it to you to interpret deer thoughts.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I am glad I was able to enjoy the sunset without mice or bugs. A rattlesnake showing up may have interrupted the peace of the moment, so I am glad it stayed away, and I am sure the mice are too.
        Haha, on the deer. Hmmm……

        Liked by 1 person

  2. At last the gods have cooperated and you have a spectacular sunset shot. The photo kind of reminds me of the Arizona state flag. Very nice. And I agree about the ocotillo. The last photo, without the ocotillo, looks the best to me.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I am not going to try to photograph the eclipse. I don’t have a good solar ND filter and wasn’t important enough to me to buy one.

      My house is in the zone of totality so I would have a very good opportunity to view it, but alas, the forecast calls for cloud cover. I don’t know what I’ll see. It may just get dark in the middle of the day and that is about it.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. The last one looks pretty good on this laptop screen. Aside from the camera’s internal HDR, I’ve never had much luck with the process. I was also thinking of a subtle version of the Arizona flag.  Not garish enough to sell to tourists.

    We had an annular eclipse in ’12. Very clear afternoon, and we hiked up to a nearby prominence and shot some some photos through welding glass. Surprisingly unimpressive effect over the lake and mountains. Apparently not at all like a total eclipse. Too bad about the weather.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I was not extremely excited about the eclipse. I was going to go have a look but I guess I don’t get as excited about it as others. Maybe we’ll get a break in the clouds and get to see a little something.

      Liked by 1 person

  6. Nice sunsets Jason. I personally like the second one without the “anterled” cactus. If you wear those glasses watching your neighbor’s Eclipse, don’t let him back up over you because you couldn’t see it!
    I kind agree that seeing an eclipse is cool, but as far as photographing one, it doesn’t interest me as much as finding critters and such. Saw a partial one a few years ago in Iowa. Neat, but okay. 🫣😳🥴

    Liked by 1 person

  7. I see lots of partial critters, always. Most times it’s their backends. But no, my mistake, the last total eclipse in 2017. Could see it from my yard. Popped put of the house a few times to watch it. But didn’t take any photos. Thought I had, but didn’t find any from that year on my drive.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I don’t have a good filter for shooting the eclipse. I have a friend who is very in to it but I think he might be disappointed by the weather. I will go out at eclipse time and see what I can see.

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