Very nice pictures, you have an eye for nice shots. Now why don't the colors ever come out looking that nice with my camera? :(

 

Thanks, Anon, but I was actually sort of unhappy with them. I hadn't checked my camera settings in advance, and it turned out that while I had it on largest image size, I didn't have the highest image quality set. So they were all like 2200x1600, but only around 1meg in file size, rather than being 3.5meg or so, for super high quality. Of course that would have filled my card up after like 120 shots, rather than 500, but I had Malaya's laptop there to offload to, if need be.

As a result i couldn't post any realy huge image sizes, since they looked pixely when over 1000x700 or so. And lots of these shots look slightly out of focus to me too.

As for the colors, every shot here was massaged in photoshop, at least a little. The desert light is very harsh and white, and things in the distance turn very hazy. I had to tweak the brightness, contrast, and levels on every shot, and these are greatly-improved over how they came out of the camera.

They're still a pale imitation of the scenes seared into my mind's eye, though. i wanna go back already.

 

Re: out-of-focus shots

I have a Canon EOS-20D and even with RAW and a camera that doesn't automatically sharpen/process the image in-camera, long-distance shots that have a lot of line-detail - such as grass, flowers, or leaves on trees - often feel out of focus or just plain don't look right to me, even if you shrink them down from max RAW size. I think this is because digital isn't that great for clumped-together detail at a distance - maybe because the sharp-pixels don't look as natural as a slight blur, for such subjects. Digital cameras are amazing, especially for close-to-middle range work, but still not quite as good as film for certain things.

Also, the auto-focus of most digital cameras are often touchy or inaccurate, especially with large areas of depth duplication or variance, like in grass fields or canyon vistas. Manual focus, if you have it, is still the best.

It's pretty rare for the average digital shot or snapshot wiewed at 75%-100% to look superb - it is, after all, like blowing up a 35mm negative 60 times, or whatever. It can happen, but that takes seriously high quality glass/equipment, patience, tripods, and/or manipulation. Myself, I'm usually too impatient for a tripod and still lack the quality glass. While I'm no pro (or photographic artist, for that matter...), I'm visually damn picky, and my camera kit-lens feels like taking pictures through a wind-pitted windshield vs. a factory-new windshield, which also has an effect at softening the image. Drives me nuts and none of my pictures ever look better than 'average' to 'OK' in terms of focus because of that, heh.

If you go back, I would buy another memory card or two and shoot in nothing but RAW...actually, I always shoot in RAW, period, even for crappy kitty pictures...but that's just me.

Sorry, this comment turned into a mini-blog...