The image above was captured just two or three mile southwest of Gilberto Luna’s jacal (see the four previous photographs in this gallery).
This is a fine example of how difficult it is to describe the topography of Big Bend. There are vast areas of flat desert, mountainous areas and then places like this: flat desert surrounded by mountainous terrain in fairly close proximity.
An interesting facet of the area in the photograph above is what may appear as the small “puddles” or “ice” on the ground. It is actually geological material that looks a lot like sheets of quartz but may actually be fine-grained white mica. That’s just a guess on my part but I can think of nothing else that they would be. They are all over this area, sheet thin and fairly fragile.
That’s my car in the foreground. In the distance is Santa Elena Canyon and Mexico beyond that.
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 14.6 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).
Image Naming Convention
• 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.