Camelback Mountain

TWX · Jan 17, 2020

Camelback Mountain and Sky Harbor International Airport, taken from South Mountain. Late afternoon.

I am aware that the colors aren't perfect. The smog was pretty bad and I had to manipulate levels a lot to get something approaching decent.

Warhorse · Jan 18, 2020

Interesting image that explains the name of the mountain.

Jeff15 · Jan 18, 2020

Nice shot.......

K9Kirk · Jan 19, 2020

Nice! I could sit there for hours just watching the planes coming in from far away and taking off. That would also be a good location for some nice, night shots. :icon_idea:

TWX · Jan 19, 2020

K9Kirk said:
Nice! I could sit there for hours just watching the planes coming in from far away and taking off. That would also be a good location for some nice, night shots.

It's actually a bit problematic. It's a VERY popular spot to look at the city from and there are loads of people everywhere including sidewalk-vendors and children not paying attention to the signs warning to stay off of various old structures and away from ledges.

If you want to see aircraft, probably the best two places with close parking are Tempe's part of Papago Park, or Governor Hunt's Tomb, in Phoenix's part of Papago Park, and from the latter you can get good views up to Hole-in-the-Rock, a natural excavation through a sandstone butte in the same area, and possibly some shots down into the Phoenix Zoo if you have a long enough lens.

There are some hiking trails in South Mountain that lead to other lookout-points, those might be better for having less people, but so far I have not pursued them. I hadn't been a terribly outdoorsy person until our daughter came along, and she's little enough that we're limited in where we can take her.

This was another shot from South Mountain, this time of Downtown Phoenix:

300mm f/11.3 1/32 second shutter ISO 100.

But this is what the jpeg straight out of the camera looked like:

I'm not particularly proud of this shot, there was just a hint of camera shake. If I remember right I was using the monopod instead of the tripod, trying it out in this kind of zoom for the first time, and I also didn't have a good feel for the correct exposure settings as evidenced by the poor in-camera jpeg.

Basically I consider myself just past novice into being a true hobbyist, in that I know when I'm doing-wrong, and sometimes I can figure out what I need to do to fix it, but when I walk into a challenging situation I'm not immediately picking camera settings that are close to what I need to get a good in-camera image. I'm getting better (that balloon festival was much later and I went in knowing I'd need long exposures and narrow apertures for long depth of field and good colors) but it'll be some time before I can confidently go into various conditions and get good photos from the outset.

All that aside even with its challenges South Mountain is a fun place to get some pictures from, and we'll probably go back again sometime soon since it's free and since I'd like to get some night-shots. They do technically close at night, but they close-for-admissions at dusk and don't kick people out until much later, so there's time for good city-lights photography in the meantime.