What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY Share this:TweetEmailPrintMoreRedditShare on TumblrLike this:Like Loading... Related SeventysixSeventyeight
Love the Saint-Exupery quote, Dev! Don’t remember it, but like many of his wry observations, so so true!
One thing that puzzles me about this image: I can’t get an easy sense of its scale. We could be fairly close to, or very far from, the objects pictured on the desert ground. Zooming in, I see near the lower left (about an inch from the margin) what appears to be a tree, with a distinct tree-shadow. If that’s what it is, and if it’s a normal-size tree, then we’re very far away. But it could be a tree-shaped weed, I suppose.
At the lower right are a bunch of specks of various colors. Zooming in again, I see blurred spots that vaguely resemble animals — some of them perhaps foraging for sparse vegetation too small to show in the picture. But this could be the result of my as-usual overactive imagination: This stuff could also be just desert debris!
Since you like your viewers to project their own fantasies into your art, I’m content to stay mystified. But if you choose to flesh anything out, well and good. We await your owl.
Thanks for dropping by Gary. Well, first of all, what do you think of my idea to invite people to come to my site to see the photo and comment? Since that social network won’t give us our engagement anyway I thought I would court the few that see my post to come visit here.
About the photo: well one thing I didn’t mention on my website post but I did on my Instagram post is that those tiny dots you see that look like animals are actually cattle, grazing. So that should give you a sense of scale of how far they are and how vast that area is. You have to drive through this region on your way to Flagstaff from Phoenix… or any northerly destination along I-17. Parts of the stretch are very arid. I have gone off road once to take photos–this was several years ago, 5 years I think–and it’s just mind boggling to see so much open space. The scenery changes quite rapidly though, because as you drive north you climb out of the valley (of the sun) and onto a plateau (mesa?) and then climb more into a mountainous region. It cools off quite quickly, there’s a lot more vegetation and it looks like a completely different place. You have seen some of those photos before. Then there’s the Grand Canyon, and if you go around it, you end up going into Colorado or Utah and it’s all different terrain.
Well, I *thought* those might be cattle or some other animals. But at that distance, it’s hard to be sure. You’re right — that does clarify the matter of scale.
Personally, I never had much luck with the “click through to comment” option. Your mileage may vary! What I ended up doing was encouraging readers and viewers to comment directly on the social-media post (which is what they clearly prefer), then arranging it so as to have those comment reflected on the blog itself.
Two ways to do this — one of them elegant and algorithmic, the other pretty low-tech. For the first, I used the Google Comments plugin that made linked comments automatically appear. Plus, people could comment from the blog (in the Google Comments section) and these comments would appear on the social network. So it worked in both directions. (But only for Google, of course.)
The second way, which I now use more often, is simply to take a screenshot of the social-media-post comments and post them to the blog in a comment of their own. Of course, this is a manual process — but an advantage is that it works for any social network: Google+, FB, Twitter, and I suppose others like Instagram. (Do I need to have an Instagram account?) For that, as you know, I typically use a sock-puppet avatar called “Choice Comments”. Someone I can really trust!
I don’t think I’m having a lot of success with the “click through to comment” either, but each post with that…well.. suggestion, gets about 20 or so views from G+. Nobody has bothered commenting though. I have thought of using the comment plugin before, but decided against it because it still doesn’t equate to page visits, just the appearance of it as the G+ comments appear on the blog. The traffic is still retained by Google. I want to divert actual traffic to my site. Also, it’s my way to spite G.
P.S.: Forgot to check the “subscribe to comments” box. Leaving this further comment in order to get those notifications. Thanks!
I often forget to check that when I reply… and I didn’t know of this fix. So I just revisit the blog I commented on to check if anyone responded to me and if I need to respond to that response etc. I wonder why it isn’t a default option.. if you comment, then you are by default notified of replies to your comment.
I agree it should be a default — and maybe, for all I know, there’s a way to make it so. Or different plugins to use, some of which provide this option, while others don’t? Not everyone wants to be notified. But there would always be an option to unclick if you don’t want email notifications.