Medera Canyon in the Coronado National Forest is a beautiful place to shoot, and all of these shots were taken within about 20-yards of each other.  Streams are common-place in the forest, and winter snows quickly turns these peaceful little streams into gushing torrents upon snow melt.

I reduced the shutter speed to around 1/15th of a second for the majority of these shots, carefully bracing myself against rocks, logs and other natural objects to help reduce camera shake.  It was an interesting experiment and one that I’m glad that I took.

Toying with the idea of going back out there with a wide angle and perhaps a tripod, at early evening, to capture the water at full-blur with the sharp, bold colors of the setting sun illuminating this gentle stream.  The experience should not disappoint.

Skrappys is a youth performing arts center in Tucson.  Covered with tasteful graffiti, this place continues to be a excellent photo opportunity for Tucson photogs.

Especially in black and white, this shots depicts the typical western city landscape fairly well.

Iron fences are commonplace in downtown Tucson.  Here, I closed down my lens to f/2.8 and focused on the third pillar in from the right.  The 17-35 still amazes me when I close down the aperture.  It remains tack sharp, background blur smooth and absolutely no light-loss around the edges of the frame.

Street lights mounted on buildings are also common in the downtown area.  Gives a slightly more elegant impression of the area.  Notice how well the lens picked up the individual grains of stucco on the wall.

Downtown memorial area of several wars fought, in large part, by the United States.

Before the sun escaped over the western mountains, I took a moment to wander around the park in search of, well, anything that the late afternoon light turned into something magically colorful, like the thorns on this cactus:

This guy means business, and probably takes no prisoners.  Think of this thorn as a fish hook meant for humans.  Yes, they hurt.  But the combination of perfect lighting and my Nikkor 105mm Micro turned this potentially painful discovery into something much more glamorous.

Or how about this one?

I shot this one with my Nikon D2h and Nikkor 105mm Micro stopped down to f/2.8, blurring the background and bringing the “sharp” scene to life.  Pay attention to where you walk out here, or thorns like these will definitely encourage you to only make that mistake once!

One more prickly scene:

No doubt about it, stopping the camera down and reducing your depth of field does a wonderful job at pulling your subject out from the background clutter and bringing it to life on film.  Micro lenses do this exceptionally well, and choosing subjects with sharp edges (and painful consequences) make for a splendid photograph.

As the sun continued to set, I noticed this guy (below) about 100 yards away.  I secured the 80-200 f/2.8 to my D2h and took aim, hoping to capture the brilliant light that softly illuminated this Saguaro – the king of all cactus in the desert.  Capture it I did.

Like virtually every other cactus in the desert, the Saguaro is lined with barbs and thorns all over the exterior, making it just as painful to accidentally run into.  The brutal size of these guys, though, makes that possibility fairly remote – or at least it should.  :)

At about 6pm local time, the sun finally set and I went scrambling to find the perfect spot to photograph the setting sun behind the park.  So, how did I do?

These Saguaros are beautifully silhouetted as the sun sets in the western sky.  As the light dwindles and temperatures drop, photographers find themselves in the middle of an experience quite unlike any other.  The colors that our atmosphere reveals at dusk are amazing.  Clouds often make those colors even better.  Perhaps one day, clouds will role into Tucson.  :)

I had to get off the beaten trail for most of these shots.  The nature trail begins at a bridge that leads over a small stream.  Instead of crossing the bridge, I walked down underneath it and followed the stream uphill a bit until I hit private property, at which time I turned back and followed the trail a bit until the sun set enough where the evening light was no longer available.

I took a few different shots of this dead leaf that fell into some tall grass growing alongside a narrow stream.  Even at f/2.8, the lens picked out the blades of grass near the focal plane very well, and the color of the leaf really stands out against the surrounding green.  I was on my knees for this shot – don’t be afraid to get a little down and dirty to give your photos a more unique perspective.

This is a shot looking up towards a grouping of leaves with the sun behind them.  I’ve always liked these kinds of shots for the colors they produce, especially in the fall after the color change.  The DoF falls off pretty quickly behind the focused-on leaf.  In fact, the background of the shot can hardly be identified.

Here is another shot looking up towards a leaf with the sun behind it.  This one is a little brighter overall, but still offers the same brilliant fall color as the other shot.  I like the blurred foreground better in this shot, and notice how well the lens captured the small veins running through the leaf.

Last shot of this kind, and I especially like how the composure of this photo grabbed some of the small branches that these leaves are growing from.  The branches here provide perspective for the shot and adds a certain element of depth even with the lens stopped down to f/2.8.

This is a tree trunk illuminated by brilliant late afternoon light.  Again, the lens delivered incredibly crisp detail of the tree’s bark and the D70 exposed both the highlights and the shadows very well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I got this shot entirely by surprise (but not by accident!).  I took the camera strap off from around my neck and held the camera out over a narrow stream, carefully balancing myself on a rock, and took this shot looking underneath the log from a tree that fell across the stream.  Thus, this was a “blind shot”; I had no idea what I was getting, but sometimes, those shots can turn out to be some of your best.  This shot was one of them.

Early evening sun fell across these rocks as I made my way along the nature trail in Madera Canyon.  This shot took a little climbing to get, but it was worth the effort.  Unfortunately, the sun set shortly after I took this shot, and my time in the woods with my camera quickly came to a close.

This is probably my favorite shot of them all.  I was able to quickly snap this shot on my way to dinner one evening.  The lighting was perfect at the time and I could not resist capturing this view.  The sky is completely blown out, but the Incredible did a very nice job at guessing fairly accurately on the correct exposure on a potentially difficult scene.  The picture is sharp enough for my needs.

This shot was taken during lunch at high noon.  Not a particularly difficult scene for the camera to expose correctly, so it didn’t blow out the sky like it did on the first shot.  Nice color, good sharpness and more than adequate for a cell phone camera.  The detail quickly falls off, however, the further in you zoom into the image – especially the tree on the left.

Another shot at high noon.  As you can see, the camera overexposed the Nob Hill Cafe sign pretty severely, especially on the left.

One more shot, again at sunset (different day than the first shot).  Again, the phone overexposed the sky but exposed nicely the typical San Francisco urban landscape in the foreground.  The colors are nice and vivid, and the sharpness is still okay (but not great).

Conclusion

You probably won’t get one of your photos published in a magazine with the Incredible (at least not without significant post processing), but for a camera build into a cell phone with a small lens, it does fairly well.  It will probably fail most of the time in particularly tough to expose situations, but then again, most cameras fail in those situations without a knowledgeable photographer to compensate for the scene’s lighting, movement and other constraints.

The lens really grabbed the color off of this prickly pear cactus in bloom here in early spring.

Excellent detail of the high, wispy clouds that occasionally filtered the direct sunlight.  Had to get on my knees to snap this scene and look almost straight up.

I threw the camera into aperture-priority and stopped down to f/2.8 to significantly narrow my depth-of-field. This is the true power of such a well-manufactured lens like the 17-35. Even when stopped down, the edges of the frame remain sharp and the background is given a smooth, blurred look that can quickly enhance almost any wide angle scene. In this case, the flowers on top of this prickly pear were brought out in excellent detail against the blurry background.

The detail of the rocks that this lens captured is outstanding. Again on my knees for these rock shots, almost every grain of dust was picked up from this lens, again stopped down to f/2.8, pulling the rocks out and away from the background and setting them in perfect focus.

I almost did not take this shot, but I’m glad that I did – with the camera stopped down, it creates a real interesting effect on this old, rusty aerosol can. It is clear how shallow the depth of field is and how well the lens picked up the relatively short focus area.

Here are several other reviews about this lens:

• Ken Rockwell’s review
• Thom Hogan’s review
• PhotoZone’s review
• Moment Corp’s review
• NaturFotoGraf’s review

The camera is mainly plastic, sports relatively ancient technology and offers a pretty small rear LCD screen.  But then again, the camera is old!  But old cameras don’t mean bad cameras.  Newer photo tools will offer clearly superior technological improvements over what the D70 can offer, but remember, it’s not the tool that captures good photographs – it’s the photographer.  This camera still works well for me, and it’s my current favorite camera to grab when I need to go out shooting, want excellent quality photographs, but do not want to lug around a heavy tank of a camera (my D2h).

It’s only 4.1 megapixels, but remember that not all megapixels are created equal.  I’ve had exceptional results with the camera, but because the majority of my photographs hit the Internet rather than photo paper, megapixels are less of an issue for me anyway.

Bottom line: this thing is a tank.

Check out Nikon’s official D2H web site.

For you techno-junkies, here are some specs for your excitement:

Megapixels: 10

Zoom: 4x Optical/4x Digital/16x Combined

Focal length: 5.0-20.0mm f/2.8-5.8 (35mm film equivalent: 28-112mm)

Focusing range: Normal: 1.6 ft./50cm-infinity
Macro: 0.8 in.-1.6 ft./2-50cm (W), 1.0-1.6 ft./30-50cm (T)
Digital Macro: 0.8 in. – 1.6 ft./2-50cm (W)

Viewfinder: None

LCD screen: 3.0-inch TFT color LCD with wide viewing angle (PureColor LCD II)
Supports 230,000 pixels

Maximum aperture: f/2.8 (W) – f/5.8 (T)

Shutter speed: 15-1/1600 sec

ISO sensitivity: Auto, High ISO Auto, ISO 80/100/200/400/800/1600 equivalent (Standard output sensitivity. Recommended exposure index)

Metering: Evaluative*, Center-weighted average, Spot**
* Control to incorporate facial brightness in Face Detection AF
** Metering frame is fixed to the center

Exposure: Program AE, i-Contrast, Manual; AE Lock

Exposure compensation: +/-2 stops in 1/3-stop increments

See Canon’s official SD880IS web site for more

From the welcome sign onward, the park offered spectacular views of breathtaking red rock formations, stunning arches and a dizzying array of walking trails through the desert landscape.

I brought my little Canon SD880IS point and shoot and Nikon D70 digital SLR.   Trekking through the walking trails, weight was an issue, so I left my Nikon D2h back for the week and grabbed my more reasonably-weighted photographic tools.

I found my SD880 to be a perfect little companion on the trails.  Small enough to easily shove into my pocket, but nice enough to be able to reliably take good quality photographs for use on the Internet, the camera does an excellent job of bridging the gap for serious amateurs who don’t want to lug around heavy equipment, but are still picky about the quality of their photos.