Bare Tree, Redrock Cliff. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A single bare tree stands against a massive sandstone cliff
This photograph had fallen by the wayside in the wake of a 2012 autumn photography trip to Utah with a group of friend. The three of us photographed mostly in various areas of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and also briefly hit Zion on the way to and from the main destinations. As happens all too frequently, after working my way through almost all the photographs from that trip other tasks intruded and I moved on. A week ago one of my shooting partners emailed me to ask if I had a photograph of him that he could use for a newsletter. I recalled that I had one of him set up next to a bit of sandstone wall along the Escalante River, and while looking for it I ended up going back through a set of RAW files shot that day.
Now, over a year later, my specific memory of this photograph is a bit fuzzy. I recall for sure that we spent the day – a cold and windy one – in a big canyon with steep sandstone walls and a meandering stream lined with cottonwood trees and other autumn vegetation, some of which had lost virtually all of its foliage. This tree was one of those almost bare ones, and growing up against the beautiful bit of sandstone cliff its form echoed that of a nearby crack in the rock.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Not your monitor – there is very definitely a purple cast to the tree.
It was there on the scene, though I have actually reduced it in post. If I altered the color to eliminate the purple (by further decreasing blue) the result would be extremely red/yellow… and not at all what it was like “for real.”
The light in these deep canyons is very unusual sometimes and colors can shift and intensify as the sun light is colored by reflecting, sometimes more than once, from the red rock of canyon rims and walls on its way down to the river.
Dan
Indeed! ;-)
Is it my monitor or is there a purple cast about the tree…?
I love it when I find a present under the tree that I had missed… =:)