Cholla Glow

Cholla Glow, Tucson Mountains

Here’s an image that’s hanging at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum gallery.  I exposed the film last summer but I didn’t “process” it until a couple weeks ago.  I’ve gone over to Gate’s Pass a number of times to try to make an image out there.  The standard is to point camera into the sun to get the pretty colors.  That’s all fine and good, but the pretty colors isn’t why I like the Tucson mountains or the gates pass area.

It seems a lot of todays photographers are obsessed with pretty sky colors.  That’s also well and good.  But I’ve come to realize it’s not the sky colors that make me want to photograph.  It’s the stuff on the ground.  The stuff on the ground that gets mowed down anytime somebody wants to build a house, or block entrance to public land,  or littered anytime someone dumps their garbage outside of a can, or tosses a used cigarette butt out a car window.

I didn’t photograph this for the light.  I photographed this for the cholla.  I photographed the cholla because I find them fascinating – that here, there is a patch of cholla (opuntia bigelovii), and they don’t seem to be on the rest of the hill or on the next but are clumped together like a clan. The light is very pretty.  But it would be nothing without something truly wonderful to reflect it.

You are reading a blog posting from the photographer Laurent Baig. Feel the wilderness experience.