After-hours arrival in Big Bend during the year 2010 meant an automated entrance fee payment and a next-day return to Park Headquarters for a receipt that must be affixed to the car’s front windshield. I was on such an errand, coming out of the Chisos Mountains, when first glimpsing the wide-open panorama through which I had driven during the ink-black morning hours. There aren’t sufficient words or photographs to do justice to this land’s abundant overload of visual delight. Even when the landscape doesn't include monolithic geological phenomenon, the beauty of Big Bend is the temporal expression of God’s imagination.
When surrounded by such a thing, a camera can only poorly capture an iota of the reality. Pictured above is a limited view looking northeast toward the Park Headquarters at Panther Junction.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 1.97 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.