Today’s photo assignment was to take both landscape and portrait images of something on the theme of “Water”.  In the Duke City, we have three major forms of open water.

First is the surprising (to the newcomer) network of concrete arroyos threaded throughout the city.  For a city that gets an average rainfall of less than nine inches, seeing so many twenty feet wide, ten feet deep channels is hard to explain.  But we get so little rain that our ground is packed solid, and when it does rain the water is not absorbed by the soil.  For flood control purposes, we have these channels.  Second is the irrigation channels and acequias that provide both flood control and irrigation.

But the “Grande” daddy of them all is the Rio Grande, sometimes called Rio Bravo.  In its 1900-mile run from the San Juan mountains in Colorado, it falls some 12,000 feet before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville/Matamoras.  On its way, it slices New Mexico in two from top to bottom, passing about two miles from my house.

Here I give you my two pics, one in landscape and one in portrait.  I know which one I like the most; if you’d like to voice your preference, there’s a comment field below that actually works.