The Artful Engineer

I mentioned last week that I missed the Arizona summer monsoons. (Note that the emphasis there is on the word monsoons, not summer.) The monsoons tend to roll in from the southeast, so if you head southeast from Tucson the desert will be getting, on average, more and more rainfall. I’m planning a future post where I will talk about it more, but 2021 was a great monsoon season, and to enjoy it I drove southeast out of Tucson to Sonoita. Tucson is at about 2,400′ elevation and Sonoita is higher at around 5,000′, so in a lot of areas the desert gives way to high grassland. There is still a lack of trees, and one advantage of this is that the skies are big, something I also enjoy about eastern Colorado.

I made three trips down towards Sonoita over a two-week span, and on one particular day—July 18—I was rewarded with wonderful skies. As the title of this post suggests, all of these images were made over the course of seventy minutes. I have arranged the images in chronological order and included the time each was taken, just for fun.

These first two images, above and below, were before the sunset colors arrived, but I always love having a dark sky above brightly-lit terrain like in the image above, especially since it is only the far hill that is lit. The image below is all about the striking cloud structures in the sky. If you look closely, there is something that looks like a water tank on the ridge about two-thirds of the way from left to right, but it is actually a National Weather Service radar. It’s an interesting little feature in the image and is nicely lit, but isn’t very noticeable unless displayed at a large size.

Unfortunately, back then I did not have a GPS attached to my camera like I do now, so I can’t be exactly sure of where I took these (although I did find that weather radar on Google Earth!) but I know they were taken along Highway 83 and I am pretty sure have I found the rough locations. I did drive about ten miles from where I took the two images above to the ones that follow, but the diversity in the skies is mostly a function of the rapidly changing light and the fact that they were taken in different directions: east, southeast, south, and northwest.

Double-rainbows are always fun. I have been blessed to see quite a few, but the challenge with a full one like this is being somewhere with a reasonably unobstructed view. Evidently 14mm on a full-frame camera is just enough to fit the outer rainbow in horizontally, but a little wider would have been nice. Next time I will try to remember to take three vertical images with the intent of stitching them into a panorama.

It didn’t take long after the rainbow for the sunset to appear in earnest. Actually, the rainbow is still present in the next image, just right of center, but is hard to see against the rest of the color in the clouds. I haven’t tried to bring out the rainbow when post-processing this image—not an easy task—but perhaps it is worth trying. I do like a lot of things about this image other than the clouds: the way that the sky just above the horizon almost looks like a band of black to white in an otherwise color scene, the white-tipped barbed-wire fence, the curve of the road, and the way the light raking across the ground highlights the textures of the dry grass and the undulations in the land.

This next image was really when the color peaked in the clouds, although I don’t find the composition as interesting. I do like the distant mountain range barely visible in the mist a little right of center on the horizon, but this image is all about the clouds.

Spinning around 180°, I took some pictures towards where the sun had disappeared to the northwest. The light trails of the passing car were a happy accident, although I was initially chagrined when it showed up. I have another version of this—taken a minute or two earlier—without the light trails where the color is a lot more like the previous image; I have featured that one on the home page (at least until it gets pushed out by another). As an aside, I am planning to make a gallery of past home-page features, but haven’t gotten around to it quite yet.

All of the preceding images have been wide views. Looking south again, this next image zooms in on a clump of (wannabe) trees on the ridge-line with the mountains beyond:

I hope you enjoyed these images from a little north of Sonoita. Every time I go through an old session like this, I am excited to try it again. But since getting there is now a 12-hour drive instead of a 1-hour drive, doing so is going to take some effort.