You have to take advantage of gray skies while you can in Tucson. They're a precious commodity. So I concentrated on taking low-contrast photos of the family, then experimented a bit with focus. My camera doesn't let you focus manually, which bothers me a lot. Nor does it enable manual adjustments to speed or aperture. This means that the gray scale-value of whatever you focus on determines the exposure of the photo. And that often causes a creativity logjam. When the contrast is lower, though, I have a lot more control.
Skylar had a great time walking in the creek. She managed to navigate "quicksand" while thankfully avoiding the real thing, which is common in Sabino Canyon. I love the brush down by the banks.
I've always been a huge fan of corrugated granite. I could sprawl on it for hours. It reminds me of childhood meditations on Pennsylvania boulders, the realization that the complexity of the landscape is mirrored in the features close at hand.
One of the things that connoisseurs of landscape often remark upon seeing the Sonoran Desert for the first time is that it's amazing how easy it is to frame a shot that even the somewhat oblivious will immediately acknowledge as aesthetically appealing. The challenge, for those who get to know the place better, is to seek out new ways of seeing that complicate the beauty without giving it a black eye.
Still, sometimes it's good to stand back and say to yourself, "If Ansel Adams had captured that in black-and-white, with a judicious use of a filter, I would have paid to see the photograph."