Recently I went through my archives to see just how many photographs of dried mud I have made over the years. It is a lot! There are perhaps a few dozen finished photographs of this subject that I have shared publicly. But there are scores of them sitting in my unprocessed raw file archives. This one, in fact, is one that I “discovered” during this search, and I’m now sharing it for the first time.
Continue reading Mud Patterns
We had finished dawn photography of nearby formations on this October morning at Arches National Park. As I was working that subject I kept noticing this remarkable bit of cliff, also in the direct morning sunlight. The larger formation of which it is a part did not offer me any obvious photographic subject, so I switched to a long lens and zeroed in on the colors and textures of this small portion of the scene.
Continue reading Cliff Face in Morning Light
Arches National Park is red rock country, a landscape dominated by the colors of Southwest sandstone. Almost all of my photographs of the area are in color, for that obvious reason. It is not just the rocks themselves — the complementary greens of vegetation and the blue of the sky feature strongly, too. But this particular view, a veritable moonscape, seems to call for a monochrome interpretation.
Continue reading Sandstone Terrain and Mountains
Several things about the scene caught my attention as we passed through this area in of Capitol Reef National Park. The background is one of the thickest and most monumental strata in this area of the park. The surface of this solid rock is, however, marked in all sorts of ways. Notably there are stains from flowing water, and in a couple of vertical bands the flow has been regard enough to encourage the growth of lichens.
Continue reading Juniper Tree, Water-Stained Cliff