This entire page of images was taken on the weekend of July 23 and 24, 2005. The rain in Arizona in 2004-2005 has made such a difference in the landscape, Sedona is now filled with bright and deep greens, a beautiful offset with the red landscape. I used only one structure during the trip, a stage-4 Sierpinski tetrahedron with an iridescent, purple tone, that I made especially for Sedona in 2002. I bring this up because it looks amazingly different in different lighting conditions, sometimes pink, sometimes blue, sometimes purple. Since I was holding the structure and looking through it to take the pictures, it was at most a couple of feet away from the camera (less than an arms length) in any given picture, while much of the background was miles away! Oftentimes, either the foreground or the background turned out fuzzy. As a casual observation, my camera (a 2MP Fujifilm Finepix) seems to handle these huge distance discrepancies much better when the sun is higher in the sky, as opposed to early and late in the day. Thru-tetras images when the sun is low in the sky seem to "fuzz out" the worst. The images with fuzzy backgrounds remind me of impressionistic art. Also, since I was holding the tetrahedron, my hand showed up in some of the pictures. When that happened, I cropped out my hand, wherever that turned out to be, accounting for the few odd-sized images on the page. Finally, I have put the images up full-sized, to allow for close-up views of the Sierpinski tetrahedron from inside the structure. If the images are too big for your monitor, in Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu, then Internet Options, choose Advanced, scroll to Browsing, and below that Multimedia Options, and check the box that says: Enable Automatic Image Resizing. Click Okay. This way, a button on the bottom-right of the image will let you go between the full-sized and screen-sized versions of these large images.

Although the images look odd in small form, some of them are very beautiful when enlarged. The openings in the Sierpinski tetrahedron serve as a myriad little windows, with the Sedona background offering different views in different windows, a tree or cloud in one, a landmass in another...

I believe the image on the left shows an unbloomed version of the plant in the center image. And I'm nearly certain it is a Century Plant, the bloom of an agave, but which genus I would not want to speculate about. Naming plants is best left to horticulturists.

The enlargement shows a bird in the sky in the image on the right. Not an accident, I've learned to focus the camera on birds, then put the camera at the place I want to take the image, if the bird flies across that spot, I snap the picture. It works almost every time, and now I can get birds in my pictures.

The bug on the right was a beautiful blue metallic color. It reminded me of a great big wasp, so I tried not to disturb it while taking its picture. The fronds of grass, not sure what it is that it is sitting on, are very beautiful as well. All in all, it made a striking addition to the day.

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