Category Archives: Photographs: Desert

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Canyon Reflections, Utah

November 25, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Reflections in the surface of a slot canyon stream, Utah

Among photographers that I know, finding ways to photograph the surface of flowing river and creek water is almost a bit of a game or even an obsession. There is something very appealing about either stopping the motion of the water, or about using longer shutter speeds to let the water blur, revealing the smooth patterns of flowing water and the interesting colorations that we can otherwise easily overlook. People I know seem to have developed their own little idiosyncratic tricks for working with this subject – special shutter speeds, an eye for particular types of reflections, and so forth.

The Utah canyons are a prime place to look for interesting reflection patterns, at least in those canyons in which the water is flowing. This narrow desert canyon contained a small, burbling steam – just enough water to be interesting and dampen boots and pants legs, but not so much as to impede progress up the canyon or make shooting difficult. The trick is to look beyond the apparent surface of the water and instead learn to look for and see the reflections instead. Part of this is looking for interesting flow and ripple patterns, such as the bit of faster moving water moving diagonally across the frame in this image. Another part is to anticipate and then find sources of reflected colored light. This photograph includes several: blue from overhead sky visible above the center of the canyon, purple and burgundy from shaded cliff faces, intense orange reflected from sunlit sandstone, and bright yellow-green from cottonwood and box elder trees.

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.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Arch in Morning Light

November 23, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Broken Bow Arch, Morning - Morning light on Broken Bow Arch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monumnet — Morning light on a backcountry arch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Morning light on a backcountry arch, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

In a land of many arches… this is another one. :-) I’ve come to understand that natural arches and natural bridges, which still seem miraculous to me when I see them and think about how they form, turn out to be almost absurdly common features in the American Southwest. My first exposure was, not surprisingly, at Arches National Monument, where there are more of them than you might believe if you did not see them with your own eyes. They seem to come in all forms and sizes: impossibly slender and long, small and delicate, big and blocky, towering above the surrounding terrain, invisible unless you happen to look the right direction in the right light, short and stubby, and seemingly infinite additional variations.

Since my first acquaintance with the more famous specimens at Arches National Park, I have had the opportunity to see a few others in less accessible locations. This one required a long and convoluted hike through terrain that held its own attractions apart from the arch – in fact, I had almost forgotten about the arch when we reached it. The photograph is from a high point near the arch – on the opposite side from our approach – and from the shady side of the feature at this time of day. From many vantage points it stands a bit too much against the sky, which did not seem to me to be the most attractive background. From this spot it was possible to find a camera position where the sky was out of the frame, and this allows the shape and texture of the arch to be seen in the light reflected from nearby walls.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Balanced Rock and Cliff, Sunrise

November 22, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dawn light on Balanced Rock and cliff face, Arches National Park

When I first visited Utah for photography, only in April of this year, I think that Arches National Park probably provoked the most serious “wow” response from me. I loved each of the parks we visited in different way, but the first-impression of Arches was, for me, stunning. It probably helped that I had more or less intentionally done no research on the place before our arrival. It also helped that my first view of the park was on a spontaneous golden-hour drive into the park from Moab late in the day, when we found ourselves with more time after arriving than we had planned on. I was stunned to see what seem to be essentially impossible formations throughout the park – the arches themselves, of course, but also the tall thin towers, long and narrow fins of sandstone, large rocks balancing on pedestals, and more.

On the second visit, this fall, I was still impressed by these amazing formation, but I also began to look past them a bit more and start to see a few of the subtle things that are there as well, and to begin to understand a few of the patterns of the place – where and when certain types of special light or atmosphere might occur. On this morning I had returned to re-shoot something that had not worked out quite the way I planned on the previous visit. Having completed that task, we moved on up the road, looking for other opportunities, of which there were many. Here, as we passed one of the large towers in the Courthouse area, I saw a photograph that juxtaposed several things: the silhouetted shape of the balanced rock on the far ridge, the brilliant morning sidelight on the nearby sandstone tower, and the early morning sun slanting across the petrified dunes area, picking up the higher points on the terrain.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Box Elder, Bend in the Creek

November 17, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A Utah canyon creek winds through a narrow canyon and past a box elder tree.

This little stream and its canyon was the first place we stopped at on our late-October photographic trip through (mostly) Utah. Before this we had shot a bit in the “touristy” part of Zion NP, but this place was quite a bit more off the beaten track. Truth be told, this was also my first time wandering/wading/rock hopping my way up one of these small Southwest canyons – so it was a special bit of adventure for me, and one that I took to very quickly. Although I felt, to some extent, like I already “knew” these places from reading and seeing the work of other photographers, it was still something special to be in the place for the first time.

We began by walking up a portion of the wash through which the stream flowed after it left the canyon. I quickly discovered that here, unlike in “my Sierra,” one does not necessarily try to avoid the water – which wouldn’t really be possible anyway – but instead you walk in it, hop or wade back and forth across it, or tread the soft sand and mud along its banks. Some figure that you’ll get wet, and they wear light footwear. I went “old school” and put on a pair of Gore-Tex hiking boots and rolled up my pants enough to keep the bottoms out of the water.

The light in such places – as the veterans of such shooting know – is a complex and interesting thing. Most of the time you don’t really want direct sunlight, so you (or I, anyway) seek out shade. But you do want reflected light, coming off of the canyon walls high above, taking on the color of the rock, and diffusing down into the depths of the canyon. Contrary to my well-developed shoot-very-early-and-shoot-very-late instincts, you also typically want to shoot during the mid-morning hours and the afternoon, and if the canyon is deep enough and oriented the right direction you may even shoot right through the noon hour! What a concept: sleep in until the sun comes up, eat breakfast, and then go shoot! In this little twist in the stream, at just about the point where we turned around, the water takes on the color of the light reflected from the sandstone walls around the bend, and a single small box elder with golden leaves adds a spot of fall color.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Desert

Canyon Reflections, Utah

Arch in Morning Light

Balanced Rock and Cliff, Sunrise

Box Elder, Bend in the Creek

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.