I hiked the Dixie Mine and the Sonoran Trail late in the day yesterday. The temperature was a comfortable 104 degrees, but for some reason, mine was the only car in the parking lot.
There is a crested saguaro at the trailhead. This is what it looked like on my way out:
I saw this cactus on my way out while hiking the Dixie Mine Trail. I think it is a type of hedgehog cactus.
I got to the boundary between the park and the preserve just as the sun was setting. Here’s a photo of Four Peaks off in the distance.
Here’s another view of Four Peaks, with a field of Teddy Bear Cholla in the foreground.
Even though it was dark, I continued to take photos on the way back. I kept the ISO at 400 or less, so some long exposure times were needed and not all of them worked out so well due to the fact that I was hand holding the camera. This one, however, looks okay.
I took another photo of the crested saguaro when I got back to the trailhead. The EXIF info says that this was shot at ISO 800, f/3.5 with an exposure bias of -1.3 for half a second. I had it in auto-HDR mode, however, and one of the exposures took a lot longer, perhaps several seconds. I’m not sure that exposure was used however since one of the Sony Specific EXIF tags indicates that an error occurred during processing. I probably moved the camera too much for that one exposure.
I sharpened this photo in GIMP using a grain extract / merge with a Gaussian blur radius of 25 pixels on the extract layer. I merged those layers together and then duplicated it and used screen mode to combine the layers.
