Tag Archives: bend

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

Tree and Sandstone Cliff

May 28, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A tree grows from a crack in the face of a redrock sandstone cliff, Zion National Park.

If this photograph looks familiar, it may be because it is! A few weeks back I posted another photograph of more or less the same subject but in landscape orientation rather than portrait orientation. There are, no doubt, many examples of interesting trees growing out of surprisingly small cracks in the faces of sandstone cliffs in Zion and other similar areas, but I spotted this one in the “Big Bend” area of Zion Canyon, where I had stopped to photograph some spring cottonwood trees along the Virgin River.

I love the juxtaposition of the rich greens of the tree with the reds and browns of the sandstone cliffs. In many ways, these are two of the main colors of this part of the Southwest – with the addition of the blue of the sky. That palette of green, red, and blue is everywhere. And there is actually a bit of the blue here, too. The interesting coloration of the dark areas of the rock seems to be partly the result of reflections of the blue light from the blue sky that was above and behind my camera position.

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

Tree and Sandstone Cliff

May 10, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A tree grows from a crack in the face of a redrock sandstone cliff, Zion National Park.

After a bit of a break, I’m back with a few more photographs from my early April shoot in various parts of Utah. To recap, this was – believe it or not – the first time I had photographed in that state. It was tremendous to experience what was to me a brand new landscape, especially since I far more often continue to work the wonderful but familiar subjects of California. We began our visit at Zion National Park, spending several days mostly in Zion Canyon along the Virgin River but also getting up to the high country to the east.

I made this photograph on a morning when we visited Weeping Rock, one of the well-known features of Zion Canyon. We may well have been a bit too early in the season, but I ended up more or less stumped by trying to find a way to photograph that feature that pleased me. However, on the walk to and from Weeping Rock I made several photographs of other features in the area that I like a lot. (One was a photo I shared earlier that included a close-up of a branch with new spring leaves.) If I recall correctly, I may have seen this tree growing out of cracks in the massive sandstone walls while at or just below Weeping Rock.

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

Sandstone Tower and Cliff, Morning

April 30, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A nearby sandstone tower backed by a more distant cliff face in morning light, Zion National Park.

If you look at the photograph that I posted yesterday, you can probably locate almost the entire composition of this photograph contained within the earlier one. This perhaps illustrates one or more things about how I sometimes think when making photographs. One approach that I think I use quite a bit is to try to isolate small sections within much larger landscapes. If you look at yesterday’s image, you’ll see that it uses a fairly familiar sort of approach, namely to include a fairly large swath of “stuff” from close to far away within the frame. Today’s image, though, eliminates out all of that other stuff that might provide a wider context and instead just “shows” one small, interesting bit of the larger scene. And, obviously, I used a longer lens – something else that I often do when shooting landscape. I’m most certainly not one of those photographers who buys into the notion that “landscape photography is done with wide-angle lenses!” I also like juxtapositions. In this scene there are perhaps quite a few – and you might even see some that I’m unaware of. There are color juxtapositions the bright green at the bottom against the very different tones of the rocks; the brighter reddish rocks in the foreground against the darker and more blue or even purple tones of the more distant rocks; the clarity of the close and sunlit red rocks against the lower contrast and somewhat haze-obstructed character of the distant cliff.

The location is in the Virgin River drainage of Zion Canyon. One person described it as “Yosemite in red,” and now that I have been there I can certainly see why! While the overall scale of this valley is smaller than that of Yosemite, the verticality of the place is just as stunning. In fact, in some ways, because the walls are closer and because of the wild colors, it may be more stunning. (Of course, Yosemite does have those waterfalls… and some crazy dome formations… and the massive scale of features like El Capitan. I digress… ;-) The smaller scale makes some kinds of photography perhaps a bit easier. For example, those “juxtapositions” I mentioned above can be fine tune a bit more readily by moving the camera position a few feet. (I did that here as I moved the camera a bit to get three trees way up on the far cliff to line up to the left of the upper section of the closer formation on the right side of the frame. Ironically, you probably didn’t even see them until I mentioned that… ;-)

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

Zion Canyon, Virgin River, Spring

April 29, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The Virgin River flows through Zion Canyon near Weeping Rock, Zion Canyon National Park, Utah.

On this morning we were back in Zion Canyon, following the Virgin River up the Valley to various locations. While it was still quite early we had walked up to the base of Weeping Rock, deep in the shaded area in the center of this photograph, and photographed there in the quiet shade. Then we moved a short distance up this part of the canyon where it makes a rather sharp series of turns and stopped an a place where there were visits up, down, and across the Virgin River and along the huge sandstone cliffs in all directions.

Looking around, I saw that there were some scattered clouds that were moving across the sky and alternative shading and lighting various portions of the landscape, and creating some dramatic effects, especially when the light came from behind the group of cottonwood trees along the banks of the river below me. The skeletal forms of the trees’ trunks were still clearly visible and, when the light was bright enough, they cast mirror-image shadows on the new grass below. The tops of the trees were fringed by new leaves, and these glowed brightly in the backlight coming from above the far cliffs above Weeping Rock. There was just enough haze in the air, amplified a bit by backlighting, to suggest the distance and massive size of the dark cliffs.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: bend

Tree and Sandstone Cliff

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Tree and Sandstone Cliff

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Sandstone Tower and Cliff, Morning

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Zion Canyon, Virgin River, Spring

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

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