Bisbee, Arizona.

This week, Ben Huberman suggests that just because we input photos via eyesight, they can also have a tactile element as well. You can read the entire challenge post here. One photograph that is in my archive immediately came to mind. The photo is of a now abandoned open pit mine in southern Arizona. The original image of the pit that I captured featured the layers of rock, but lacked a depth and texture. I opened the image in Nik HDR-2 and processed it to bring out greater detail. The high dynamic range process revealed a texture that the original photo lacked. Just because I feel like sharing some history, here’s some detail on the history of mining in the Bisbee area.

The small Arizona town of Bisbee, Arizona (about 5200 population) has a history of mining. In its heyday, miners found copper, gold and silver in the nearby mountains. Today, tourists can get a taste for the mining life by touring the Copper Queen Mine. Now long played out, the mining cars still take visitors inside the mine to give them a glimpse of the underground mining process and the daily life of a miner.

A short distance from the Copper Queen mine, the Lavender open pit mine is now a part of Bisbee’s mining history. Named for Harrison M. Lavender, this project opened in 1950 at the site of an earlier mine. The major product of the mine was copper, though gold, silver and copper were also produced until the mine closed permanently in 1974.

John Steiner