Sunday, January 18, 2009

Petroglyph Photo Jaunt

This fellow was waaaaay up the side of the hill, spotted first by my eagle-eye son. It was the last photo I shot as we left, a reminder that we were returning to the land of the present, with a living creature saying goodbye.

I don't recall ever being to a petroglyph site that did not include quite a few glyphs depicting deer, this one was no different. It amazes me that the different tribes in far apart areas all used the same symbolism to depict deer, they are instantly recognizeable in all cases. There are also always depictions of snakes...I guess they all ate venison and dealt with snakes!
This one shows what I believe is a tree, probably a Paloverde, since those were in abundance in this area.

We joined our son and his fiance yesterday on a photo jaunt to an urban petroglyph site near Phoenix (Deer Valley Rock Art Center). To protect the vulnerable petroglyphs, there was a path winding through the most visible ones, but they were high up and we had to shoot photos into the sun, never a good thing! Most of the other petroglyph sites we have visited have allowed much closer access to the glyphs, but since this was an urban site I suppose extra care had to be taken to protect them. Here are a few of the ones I worked with for the blog. This one is the worst for sun flare, but I wanted to share it since I believe it contains the Thunderbird symbol. I was using my 49-150 mm lens with a x 1.7 multiplier, polarizing filter, lens hood and fingers crossed that I could capture these.

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