The Artful Engineer

Cameo? Be sure to read to the end!

I mentioned two weeks ago that I missed the Arizona summer monsoons. (Note that the emphasis there is on the word monsoons, not summer, but of course you don’t get one without the other.) The Sonoran desert is the wettest desert in the world, and the summer monsoons are why. In July—typically a peak monsoon month—of 2021, Tucson had its wettest single month on record with just over 8 inches of rain. It should be pointed out that monsoons tend to be localized, so the official recording spot at the Tucson airport could be getting blasted when most of the area is bone dry. And vice versa. Nevertheless, it was a very wet month and the desert was very green.

The post before last—too bad penprevious is not a word—focused on a brief window of time during that month, but I actually made three trips down to Sonoita over a two week span. For me, one of the attractions of the area is the abundant ocotillo. Ocotillo is not a cactus, but a shrub, although admittedly a rather vicious one if crossed. They are usually leafless, but several times a year they will respond to rainfall by leafing out before dropping their leaves a after a few weeks. Much like the springtime leaves on a deciduous tree, they begin as a vibrant green:

The preceding image uses a long telephoto to emphasize the density of ocotillo and all but eliminates anything that isn’t green from the frame. The next image uses the long telephoto to isolate the yucca against a blurred pattern of ocotillo. I like the color palette in this image, with muted greens and yellows set against the rich vibrant greens of the background:

If it wasn’t clear from the image at the top of this post, it should be clear from this next one that when the ocotillo are in leaf, they are the greenest thing around. I like the way that the angled sunlight in this image lights up the ocotillo while setting them against a much darker slope behind them. As this image shows, ocotillo really light up when backlit: their leaves are not dense enough to significantly shadow the near side of the plant from the sun on the far side.

And now for the promised cameo! I enrolled in an online course by David duChemin called Shoot What it Feels Like, which has a follow-on called Develop What it Feels Like. When the latter started, David solicited raw images that he could use as examples to edit in Adobe Lightroom. His course isn’t about trying to fix or repair an image that has problems, but about how to edit an image so that it conveys a mood or feeling. Anyway, I was game and looked for an image that had potential but seemed challenging. I submitted the following image, which David used in Episode 5. He kindly agreed to send me his version so I could share it here:

Editing an image is a rather personal effort, and I might edit the same image very differently today than I would a year from now, so it is not surprising that David took a very different approach than I would have. And, in fact, that is why I sent him an image at all, because I thought it would be fun to see what someone else did with it. I will be honest and say that as I watched his edit on the video, I didn’t like it. (Who adds green to a sky!?) But after looking at it for a while, it has grown on me. It isn’t the direction I would take the image—the whole point of exercise, of course—but it does, indeed, convey a feeling. I thought about it for a long time before I titled David’s version “Fatigue”. It makes me feel like the ocotillo and the little sidekick agave are contemplating tomorrow’s long march to the distant mountain.

As it happens, between the time that I submitted this image for David’s consideration and seeing it appear in his course, I edited this image myself and ended up here:

The only change I made after seeing David’s version was to shift my crop up slightly—I had initially removed all of the sky, but eventually decided that the ocotillo looked crowded against the top of the frame. The extra bit of hills along the top of the frame also give the image more depth.

Comparing the two versions, the obvious difference is the crop, of course. In the end I decided that the bright sky was too much of a distraction from what I considered the main event in the foreground. (David’s addition of green to the sky, on the other hand, actually connected the sky and the foreground, something that never occurred to me.) My foreground is more contrasty and I emphasized that line of golden grass across the frame. I also went through (somewhat painstakingly) and highlighted the barbed-wire fence, too. In fact, when displayed at a larger size, you can see the individual barbs on the fence catching the light:

One difference between David’s edit and mine is that his is more of a grand landscape where the ocotillo is a supporting element whereas mine is more of an intimate landscape where the ocotillo is the subject and everything else is context. Mine also highlights all the parallel lines that go across the frame at a slight diagonal, something that is much less prominent in David’s version. Overall, my version is more graphic—more high contrast lines and patterns—whereas his is more atmospheric.

Two very different renditions. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

I want to thank David for choosing my image to process and allowing me to use it here. I highly recommend his books and blog and courses and podcasts.

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