Photo: Papago Red Rock in Desert Color

This image shows a red rock formation in Papago Park, Phoenix, Arizona surrounded by a short-lived display of winter color. In fact, I will need to wait until next winter to see these bluish-hued blossoms again. Their appearance is entirely dependent upon the generosity of summer monsoon rains.

This was captured with a Sony Alpha A-200 DSLR (Sony’s low cost 10 megapixel DSLR) combined with a 40-year old Asashi (Pentax) 28mm F:3.5 prime lens in M42 mount (m42-Sony lens mount adapter). This classic lens performs beautifully on modern DSLR’s, rendering beautiful colors and sharp edge-to-edge results. It is also quite good at rendering very subtle colorations in low light scenes like this one. This is also one of the few times that I shot in-camera jpeg instead of raw. I am quite pleased with the way the camera rendered the default scene. Other than a touch of sharpening and saturation, there was no post-processing required.