NEW mexico

At Jar's request, here's a photo documentary of my trip last week. I tried to get some of my friends and I as well as some that exhibit my attempts at photographic art. Yeah... It was just myself and three girls... lol There were supposed to be two other guys going, but they chickened out. Sandstone bluffs above the Malpais (badlands) near Grants. Bandera Volcano. CJ and I climbed up a few hundred feet of shifting lava rock to get a better look... ...me trying to compete with Ansel Adams... continued in next post

...aquairum/zoo/museum/botanical gardens place at Albuquerque Campin' out near cloudcroft... Laura is dancing around with corn? I photoshopped this picture by a broken bridge in a meadow around Cloudcroft. Me giving a rocket an anal exam while Laura observes at the Space Museum in Alamogordo. About to go camping at the White Sands... Little did we know that in an hour we would be pinned down by a huge SANDSTORM! Sunset just before the sandstorm hit as the front came through. Sunrise the next morning. If they knew I put this on the net, I'd be dead!This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 08-19-2004 04:59 PM

Carlsbad Caverns... It's cool, but too touristy for me. I'd rather put on a hard hat, grab a torch and go exploring! On the cold, windy, and rainy Guadalupe Peak 8,749 feet, the tallest in Texas. Fossilized... Brachoids? I forgot what they are called... lots of little elongated oval shaped creatures near the top of the El Capitan Limestone formation. A deer in the guadalupe mountains. Guadalupe Peak trail.

Freakin HUGE! It loomed on the horizon from the road over 35 miles away.The evevation gain from the campground was about 3000 feet. The only thing I've seen bigger in real life is Blanca PK in CO (14,400 some odd feet). The surrounding plains are around 7000 feet for a total elevation gain of about 7000 feet straight up.Here's another pic from near Pine Springs Campground. Guadalupe and El Capitan are behind this mountain. And here's looking down on top of El Capitan from Gaudalupe PK. I didn't ever get a picture from the front of it... I should have though. We drove through the Delaware Basin on our way out towards the interstate.

Thanks... Its a brand new Cannon Powershot A80.ETA: 4.0 megapixels, so I could blow these up as big as 25" x 30" without looking grainy.This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 08-19-2004 07:46 PM

lol sure thing.... I was kinda sad I didn't have another guy there to make fun of the girls in their... well, girliness.It's a good thing they had me there.. I planned the whole trip AND man, girls cannot tell directions. They insisted we stopped for directions in Carlsbad even though I told them we were heading the right way. The female cashier said just keep going and waved her hand in an ambiguously southern direction. Liz says, "okay thanx". I say, "wait a minute, which direction?" ... she says, "north, uh I mean south."So we go South, but the girls don't believe me that we are heading south (I was a boyscout once..). It turns out south WAS the wrong direction there had been no reason to ask the cashier for directions. They STILL didn't believe me that we were going south... So I get out my compass and it says we were heading due south... and Liz says, "Wellll... maybe the compass is off." And afterward ALL of them blamed me for having us go in the wrong direction!!!This scenario was repeated in similar fashions on trails and in other cities as well.But for the most part I can't complain. I've been friends with them since we were juniors. They are pretty tough and adventurous in the outdoors. Here's a few more from the white sands: We got this disc and slid down the dunes... Believe it or not they decide to do YOGA as this massive sandstorm races towards us (you can see it in the background). It hit in full force less than 5 minutes after this pic. We got in our bags and wrapped our ground tarp around to be protected from the natural sandblaster. Our little outpost the next morning. She would REALLY kill me about this one! Thunderstorm in the mountains from the white sands that night. I'm surprised my little camera captured it. I put it on 15 sec exposure and then cropped it and enhanced it with photoshop. And a panoramic... I don't know how well this will work on the net. If I blew this up to full size it would be about 5 or 6 feet long.This message has been edited by AdminAsgara, 08-20-2004 10:33 AM

Here's a few more... Our little ghetto setup. CJ and I trying to look smart while playing chess. mmm fruit rollups Giant land at the botanical gardens in Albuquerque ...and another corny shot. It was actually raining/hailing in this picture.. Laura trying to land the space shuttle... (she crashed..)

And a few more I already have shrunk down. I stylized these two with photoshop as well.And another guadalupe in panoramic format.(The camera has this feature where you can take a bunch of pictures and the computer software will stitch them together.)This message has been edited by AdminAsgara, 08-20-2004 10:35 AM

Thanks. It does take REALLY good pictures and has a lot of settings to play with. And I love that I can take such large format photographs.While the natural pictures look really good, I must admit I cropped and enhanced some of these with photoshop as well.

Thanx, it wasn't all that great a pic to start off with, but taking out the reds and blues, cropping, and adding the swirls made it look pretty cool.

Haven't really used the software that came with it. I did use photostitch, which came with it, to stitch the panoramics. I used photoshop mainly to crop and sometimes add some contrast or fix lighting problems. It also has some cool artsy filters and effects to use, especially with the flower pics.Oh, and I should also add that that really awesome picture of the orange butterfly on the green petals was taken by Liz with my camera. We got lots of great butterfly pics at the botanical gardens, but that shot tops them all.

It sure was green! The greenest I've ever seen West Texas. A few hundred miles north in Albuquerque they are dry as a bone. Apparently their aquifer is about to dry up in the next couple of years, and they have no contingency plan. I think the monsoon got cut off too far south this year. Well, I have a little bit to say about it that we could discuss.

Thanks for the offer, but It'll probably be a few years or more before I have the funds and the opportunities with friends for some kind of international trip. I'm just a poor college kid right now. This trip, spontaneous as it was, was perfect... it only cost us about $140 per person for 8 days.Belize sounds like an awesome place though.

lol ...I should get like a commission from Cannon for showing all these...I got mine on ebay brand new with the software, usb cable an extra 128 mb flash memory card, and shipping for around $280 to $290. I don't know how much Adobe Elements Photoshop is... I sorta pirated that from my parents...This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 08-20-2004 07:06 AM

Sure, go for it.ETA: If there's a particular one that you want larger, I could upload a larger one. I shrunk them because I didn't know how much information could be shown on a page before it caused things to crash.This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 08-20-2004 04:06 PM