Sunsets & Saguaros

July of 2019 marked the beginning of a series of regular visits to Arizona. First it was Tucson then Phoenix and eventually my favorite, Scottsdale. With each visit, my camera was always close by and I began capturing images. I fell in love with the colors, textures, and landscape of the desert.

The Arizona is always inspiring. It’s a far cry from coastal California where I’ve spend most of my life. The desert is harsh and the summers can be annoyingly hot. Yet the monsoons that arrive in mid-June generate amazing cloud formations and sunsets filled with explosions of orange, yellow, red and if you’re lucky, a splash of purple.

I am a firm believer that a change of scenery does the soul good. The desert visits have provided plenty of inspiration, and thousands of images. After letting my collection of images stack up in my iCloud account for over seven years, I finally decided to sort through them and I did find a common theme.

Sunsets and saguaros.

While the sunsets are filled with unexpected color combinations and cloud formations, the graphic and sculptural qualities of the saguaro trees continued the catch my eye...many times in the same image.

Now when I look at the state flag of Arizona, I believe the designers just looked out the window at one of the many breathtaking sunsets to find inspiration.