Amelia’s mouth watered, and she shared a small loaf with Sadie. They munched in silence. Above the hard-baked earth of the large, unpaved courtyard, dust-laden heat waves pirouetted in the air. Amelia found the clay tones of the land and buildings harsh and hostile. Her eyes scanned the area seeking a bit of color and found it in the ropes of red peppers affixed to the beams above the sheds that shaded the sale tables.

“Look, Sadie. Red peppers. Let’s get some shots of you with clusters hanging on either side of your head.”

They strolled over, explained to the vendor what they wanted to do. He agreed. Amelia positioned Sadie and the child preened and posed, turning her head this way and that, laughing. Amelia tipped the vendor, and they ambled back to where Miriam and Ben sat, their heads close in conversation.

Far to one side, beyond the bus, a narrow brook twisted through the crusted landscape, and Martha Dinsk kneeled in the dust to shoot, to work with a small group of students. Some of them stretched out flat on the hard-baked earth, shooting both river and pueblo, probably using a 28 millimeter or 24 millimeter lens, which Amelia knew were Martha’s favored lenses. With the river prominent in the foreground of the shot and the pueblo beyond, either the twenty-four or twenty-eight lens offered a perfectly focused shot from river to pueblo.

Lying on the hard, dusty ground or squatting hardly appealed to Amelia, although with Sadie in tow, she rejoined the others by the river. Amelia set up her tripod and camera, attached her longest lens, and faced the pueblo. She adjusted the lens for a perfectly focused pueblo and let the area halfway to the pueblo go soft and blurry. She waited and waited. Her back and legs began to hurt. Most of the others followed Martha to where the Native American woman was again drawing paddles of bread from her oven.

And then it happened! Five children in bright red, green, and yellow ponchos, followed by a bent old man with a walking stick, emerged from a ground-floor doorway of the pueblo. Amelia began to take beautiful photographs and stopped only when the small troupe vanished around a corner.

At that moment Ben, Miriam, and Martha Dinsk joined her. “Yes.” Martha turned to Ben. “You can meet the shooting requirements at Bandelier. The hotel will pack you a picnic lunch. Be sure you take plenty of water.”

The return trip included a rest stop at a small church, the Santuario de Chimayó, that sat behind high adobe walls and was known locally as the Lourdes of the Southwest. Amelia came away with memories of the red-and-gold carved and hand-painted wooden altar and the reredos, the sacred painting rising to the ceiling behind the altar. She sat for a time in a pew in the dim interior, unwilling to defile the peace of the church by shooting photographs with a flash.