Beautiful shot. Great clarity, great sky and I love how the sun star mirrors a cholla ball.
I was an uninitiated noobie with Cholla several years ago. I left the trail to get some shots. Some time later I looked down and saw a cholla ball attached to my calf muscle. I tried to pull it off. The bastard hooks on the end of the spikes made it a very unpleasant experience. .
awesome shot of some difficult light. when i was shooting similar scene at sunset near phoenix around 4 or 5 years ago, my brilliant 5 year old decided to kick a cactus shaped like a ball that is in your photo. That was the end of that trip
Amazing shot. I also had the same experience. I went pretty close to that while taking a macro of the flower and later on realized that a ball has attached itself to my calf muscle. Tried pulling it out and ended up having some barbs dislodged from the ball and still in the flesh. Had to go to the hospital to get them out
Superb image. You handled the light perfectly and the composition is excellent. I walked into a field of cholla in Joshua Tree Nat'l Park without having any idea what the consequences could be.
Just a feature of the lens, Morris, and f/stop. Some lenses just do a better job with starburst than others. Many times the ones with a filter would have less number of rays, like 8, 6, maybe more.
morris wrote:
This is a beauty Robert. Star burst filter?
No good place to catch a cholla, they go through pants and boots and skin. Wind makes them fall further from the plant than expected, and they can be concealed by other vegetation, and suddenly it's on you, a deadly sphere of spines without a place to touch to remove it.
dakel wrote:
Beautiful shot. Great clarity, great sky and I love how the sun star mirrors a cholla ball.
I was an uninitiated noobie with Cholla several years ago. I left the trail to get some shots. Some time later I looked down and saw a cholla ball attached to my calf muscle. I tried to pull it off. The bastard hooks on the end of the spikes made it a very unpleasant experience. .
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khurram1 wrote:
awesome shot of some difficult light. when i was shooting similar scene at sunset near phoenix around 4 or 5 years ago, my brilliant 5 year old decided to kick a cactus shaped like a ball that is in your photo. That was the end of that trip
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roythegreat wrote:
Amazing shot. I also had the same experience. I went pretty close to that while taking a macro of the flower and later on realized that a ball has attached itself to my calf muscle. Tried pulling it out and ended up having some barbs dislodged from the ball and still in the flesh. Had to go to the hospital to get them out
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bnfotografie wrote:
Superb image. You handled the light perfectly and the composition is excellent. I walked into a field of cholla in Joshua Tree Nat'l Park without having any idea what the consequences could be.
Cholla advice: Look uphill. The pads break off and roll down hill. You can catch one with your foot/boot when some distance away. My best trick was to step on one and then shove it into the back of the other leg when I stepped forward.
I now carry a large toothed comb when hiking the desert. If a pad become embedded, you can work the comb behind the pad and remove it without grabbing it with your hand.
Nice image but most definitely not a cholla. Not sure what this variety of cactus is called but in comparison to the jumping cholla it is completely harmless and innocuous.
Most definitely cholla
Most cholla jump. The one above jumps.
It's easy to tell, if it's a sphere of destruction like the balls on the ground here, it's cholla. Some cholla is more rectangular stem with thorns sticking out, not the symmetrically perfect thorn ball without the green inside showing.
GroovyGeek wrote:
Nice image but most definitely not a cholla. Not sure what this variety of cactus is called but in comparison to the jumping cholla it is completely harmless and innocuous.
Eh, you are probably right that it is some species of cholla, but not the nasty kind. I have leaned on those a good number of times and in comparison to the teddy bear variety they are downright harmless. The teddybears are truly nasty stuff. You kneel to take a pic and get stung by a ground ball. You instinctively swat it away and now you have aground ball in your fingertips - painful as hell. I have actually had to use the bottom of my tripod to grab on a ball that was semi-permanently attached to my fingertips so I can yank my fingers away without the ball ending up attached to another body part. But they are the best looking variety in backlight.
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