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I normally don't do this due to their size, but decided to insert a panorama as a "parting shot" to this series (pun intended). This five-shot capture of Caprock Canyons shows the awesome beauty of the still-wild lands of West Texas:
Did a bit of selective sharpening on this guy to increase the contrast of the stalks against the dirt background.
The wide, flat plains make for good tree shots such as these...
This is one of the side doors of the church.
Thought this zoomed-in view of the windows might be interesting in black and white:
Another look of the front side, to the left of the steps.
One can imagine the preacher standing at the top of these steps greeting his flock on Sunday morning...
A dozen or so miles to the west of Childress, Texas is a little community called Tell. We didn't see the Baptist church that this sign advertizes, but did find an irresistible old church that obviously hasn't been occupied for years, as evidenced in the following postings.
About five miles from Turkey, on FM 656, is this strange sight. We had no idea what it was until seeing the electric boxes at the base of each column. The place was totally empty - the creaking of the aluminum vanes, some of which still turned, along with the scattered debris really gave the place an eerie feel.
This was our last stop in Caprock before heading back to Bowie. There was a trail head here but no time...
In an earlier posting - from the zoo in Colorado Springs - I have a picture of three giraffes behind this type of thorny bush, and liked it a lot. In this posting the thorn bush is not nearly as thick, which allows a pretty good view of the landscape beyond.
This was pretty close. Occasionally the animals would look at us with mild interest, but evidently were very used to people with cameras.
Here is my friend in a shot that evokes the vastness of West Texas. He is using his Canon to shoot a herd of buffalo. They had signs all over the place warning against getting too close, and this is about as close as he got, as evidenced in tomorrow's posting...
Here's the town's water tower, which I thought had a neat lightning rod, though I didn't notice it until post-capture.
Here is a closer-up view of the sign. After using perspective to square it up some, had to resort to distorting just one side since I wasn't positioned exactly in the middle. Next the black dropper in the Levels tool was used to enhance the silhouette, which had the added benefit of darkening the blue of the sky and making the clouds stand out.
Our destination in going down Hwy 70 was Turkey, a very small town that has an obvious claim to fame. I was on a slight rise, shooting from various angles to get the water tower in just the right place among the elements of the sign.
Exactly 14.6 miles south of the gas station, on Hwy 70, the road crosses a dry riverbed. We stopped and snapped a few of this outcropping, which likely - like much of Palo Duro - was made of clay.
Many of the fields had railroad boxcars in them, obviously a (cheap) source of storage. This is a Santa Fe logo on one of those cars, between the gas station and an occupied home. My friend took some shots of this also, to hang in his new son's room, which happens to have a railroad theme.
This was taken in the front yard of a house across the highway from the gas station. If you look closely, there is a car hood stored just inside the shed.
This and the next two posts will be of the area immediately surrounding the station. There was an occupied house close by, along with plowed fields of cotton just after harvest.
It was very windy during much of the trip, and true-to-form tumbleweeds often crossed our path on the road. There were some piled up in the corner of the service bay, and I couldn't resist capturing the contrast between the dry, colorless weed and the red wall behind.
The photo on top is a straight-on view of the dilapidated
service bay. The sun came out for a brief time, allowing for some
interesting shadows in the photo below:
In another venture into black and white, this is a frontal view of the entire station. For most of my post-capture work I'm still just in Photoshop Elements 7.0, but had no idea how many options there are in converting an image to black and white! One was labeled landscape, which looked OK to me. I tinkered just a little more to adjust perspective and show the clouds with more contrast.
The bottom of the same window is more clearly seen in this shot of a doorway leading to what used to be the service bay.
Speaking of my buddy - here he is taking photos, possibly of the branches against the sky. His photography is way, way beyond mine, and his equipment is pro-level Canon (as opposed to semi-pro Nikon, as represented by the Big Cahoona, my D300s). While at Palo Duro I even took to following him around, unabashedly emulating his shots just to learn.
His presence in the shot, however, is not why I consider this a keeper. I stood in my place for a good five minutes trying to get the window just right on the other side of the of station. The scene beyond is not exactly focused, but the color and definition is clear enough to get the idea...
Hwy 70 intersects Hwy 256 21.5 miles west of Memphis, Texas. There you will find a gas station that has been abandoned for a while, which of course proved to be irresistible to my buddy and I; we stopped for more than an hour snapping photos of the station as well as its surroundings. And being winter, there were plenty of opportunities to take pictures of things through things, namely the bare branches of the overgrowth in its yard.
Dozens of pictures were taken, but they all began to look the same, in spite of the amazing color. This was one of the last captures of the morning. There was a considerable amount of trash that had to be cleaned up photoshopically in these postings.
Somehow, even from the back, this little tyke appears to have a great deal of skepticism about what he's looking at.
The next morning we went from the hotel to see some sights in the area. This is something they call Cadillac Ranch...been around for decades, but was moved to this field a few years ago. I lived in Amarillo for three summers and a fall, then two years in Memphis (TX) later on, but never made it out to see this until now. An interesting spectacle in and of itself, but for some reason people are allowed to bring spray cans of paint to gussy it up. From the looks of things here it's a family tradition...
It was mostly cloudy that day we were there, but did get sun enough for shots like this once in a while...
These are the boots that my friend was wearing during the excursion...saw lots of this style in Bowie, where he lives.
Zooming out from just about the same place, near the mouth of the cave, is a mound on the north side of the path; those on that side for some reason were more jagged, not uniform at all.
A lot of post-capture time was spent on this photo, as the branch was slightly pinkish in places, almost matching the clay. In order to make it stand out more, a layer was created of just the wood, which was then desaturated and given more contrast.
This is a close look at the walls of those roundish formations. It was interesting to note that instead of rock, they were made of clay that you literally could crumble away. Being such, the white layers were not solid, and leached down the sides of the formation.
The late-afternoon sun came out for a while, which highlighted these mound formations just to the south of the path leading up to the cave. This photo is untouched except for a little rotation.
We were driving along, scoping out the park, when we came upon this cave. The guy standing at its entrance give a sense of scale, but it didn't go in very far - only about twenty feet.
Interestingly, the guy pictured had a laryngotomy three weeks before, and could not speak, his wife told us. Wish we'd gotten their e-mail address, as photos featuring him turned out to be some of the better pictures of the formation, and it would have been satisfying to send them their way...
This fence was just outside the only gift shop/tourist trap in the canyon, the top picture being one of my very few endeavors into black and white photography.
We were driving along after taking pictures in the cabin area when, upon rounding a curve, these guys jumped up from the side of the road and ran into the wilderness. By the time we snapped to what was happening they had disappeared, but I went looking, climbing to the top of a nearby peak. After waiting several minutes with camera in hand, they appeared in the distance, still ambling away from the road. I started hollering and making whooping noises until one looked back in my direction. This is at the full 200mm zoom, but had to crop in quite a bit to get this composition.
Learned that they are called Aoudad in the area.
This is a fairly cropped-in shot taken just outside the cabin area.
Captured just a few steps from my new-found retirement home...
Let this be a POSTCARD ALERT! POSTCARD ALERT! Many of
the following pictures will be run-of-the-mill, even mundane photos that
may as well end up on postcards. Nevertheless, I've had fun capturing
these landscapes and working with them in order to share the beauty of
the North Texas canyon system.
Out in the middle of the canyon was this cabin, the home
of my dreams. Actually, it was just one of four or five out there and
none were occupied, which left us wondering if they are even available
for rent. I plan on checking for availability in September or October.
I believe this shot takes "rustic" to a whole new level! These controls and instruments were
on the left side of the front covering of the tractor. The Big
Cahoona, as usual, behaved beautifully, and with 12 megapixels the
detail shows very well on the instrument dial if you zoom in. 12 MP
might not be the standard now, with 16- and 21-MP showing up even in
point-and-shoots, but does a sufficient job and is a good place to learn.
The front grill. Somebody long ago taught me something about tractors. He said that since they are used only seasonally, and don't have to go through the on-off cycle nearly as much as a car, these old machines are good for many decades if you take care of them. Buying one that's ten or twenty years old is the same as buying a year-old car.
Zooming in on the intricacies of the motor, thought this would look good with Glowing Edges, done in Elements 7.
A good friend and I went to Palo Duro Canyon about three weeks ago, and side-stepped on the way to a field that had this old tractor and some other implements that were photo-worthy.
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