White Tank Mountain Park – A Gallery in Black and White

Waddell, Arizona.

One of our first discoveries in Arizona is a favorite hiking place for me. The White Tank Mountain Regional Park is about 20 minutes from our house in Buckeye. Last spring, I saw an announcement of a blsck-and-white photo contest with the prizes being displays of the photographs at the nature center. I quickly put together a collection of black-and-white images. Though I didn’t win the first prize, the three images featured were all selected to be printed and displayed in the White Tank Mountain Nature Center.

The one thing I noticed about the images I chose is that almost all of them had interesting cloud patterns in the sky that were made more interesting in the conversion to black-and-white. Though my favorite photo wasn’t selected, all of the ones that were exhibit a dynamic sky, something that I’ve noticed Arizona seems to be adept at displaying. When I completed the collection of edited images for submission, I decided to create a calendar for my office. It was then I realized I didn’t have enough images to fill a calendar, so it was back to finding other views of the park to convert.

I ended up needing 13 images, one for each month and one for the cover. The back cover consisted of thumbnails of the 13 included images. There are no shortage of online photo printers who offer calendar prints from your photos, so I picked one where I could upload the photos online and then pick up the completed calendar when it was delivered to the outlet in our neighborhood. No shipping costs. Yay for me. The gallery below features the entire collection of images from that calendar. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

On a side note about my photo composition habits. I noticed also that my favorite images appear to feature a saguaro on the right side of the image. Reviewing all my images gathered in the park, I found very few where I centered the giant cactus or placed it on the left. I will have to think about this the next time I go photo hunting in the desert.