Cottonwood trees in full autumn color line a gulch as it passes between sandstone hills
I came upon this beautiful cottonwood-filled valley on a short drive I took out of Boulder, Utah while waiting for my late-afternoon check-in on my first day in a motel after a week of camping. As you can imagine, I was looking forward to this change in accommodations and the chance to get a shower and sleep in a real bed!
My drive took me a short distance out on the Burr Trail, which ends in Boulder. I’ve been over a good portion of this route (which is a road, despite the “trail” in its name) a few times in the past, using it to get to Boulder from a somewhat isolated area of Capitol Reef National Park. My goal on this little drive was a long, narrow sandstone canyon that is just a few miles out of town, but it turned out that the canyon was less interesting in the light I had to work with than this stretch of cottonwoods was. I came upon this site in a spot where the road descends through a sharp set of hairpin turns as it drops toward the valley. Along this section there are turnouts that provide open views into the valley and along its course as it winds into the distance. From this spot the valley was filled with more cottonwoods than I usually see around such a creek — typically they line up along its banks, but here the filled the valley between the red rocks from side to side.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Dusk light on the curving pothole forms of Utah sandstone
The grand landscape is a wonderful and impressive thing, but a bit of dusk light on curving rock can evoke the fundamental qualities of a place. This was my final photograph of the day, made just before there was no longer enough light for the kinds of photograph I had in mind, and as it was about to become to dark to find my way out of this landscape. Earlier I had begun by photographing subjects that were perhaps more clearly specific to this location, but as I continued to photograph and as the light changed I made photographs that I think are less about the particular location and more about the feeling of such places.
The light was tricky on this evening. There had been sunlight earlier, and at times it had been the beautiful soft yet direct light of the sun coming through high clouds. But it has also been very muted at times, as the clouds became thicker, producing the a kind of flat and colorless light that is challenging. But earlier clouds can lead to later sky color as the sun drops near the horizon and lights up these same dull clouds from underneath. As I finished with some of the more obvious photographic subjects I began to look at the patterns and colors of the rocks as possible subjects of more abstract images, and it was at about this point that the sky opened up for a few minutes, producing light with colors ranging from yellow to red to burgundy. I made this final photograph of the evening as the tempo of the work slowed in luminous twilight, and this light combined with the natural color of the sandstone to produce intense and saturated colors on the sinuous shapes of the rock. A moment later we all realized that it had become quite dark, that we had not brought headlamps, and that we had to negotiate some tricky terrain in order to get back to where we started!
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
P”Working the Red Rock Landscape” — Photographers at work in Utah’s red rock country
A group of us assembled in the outback of southern Utah in October for a few days of landscape photography — and I was perhaps the odd man out as the person least familiar with Utah subjects. Not that I haven’t shot there before… I’ve actually spent perhaps a month and a half photographing in the state in the past few years, all told, and I’m becoming more and more familiar with the visual quality and the rhythms of the place. However, the others were mostly from the Southwest, and they have the same sorts of instincts for this land that I have for the Sierra.
We spent a few days in this red rock landscape of domes, hills, gulches, and canyons. On this evening we went to a location where red sandstone hills rise above the flatlands and stretch into the distance, and are filled with a seemingly infinite variety of textures and shapes and plant life. Here we stopped to photograph an old cottonwood snag in the middle of an expanse of sandstone.
This is another multi-photograph post — in this one I share four photographs from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument that feature trees in various back-country landscapes ranging from the canyons and rock formations to one otherwise perhaps un-notable stop near a campsite where I stayed.
Colorful autumn foliage on a cottonwood tree next to a creek at the bottom of a deep sandstone canyon
This stout cottonwood tree grows in the wash at the bottom of this deep canyon, at the base of huge sandstone walls that tower above and wrap around curves in the canyon’s path. I had stopped here to photograph a different tree — it is among those shared in this group — and after finishing with that tree I looked over here to see this one standing against the worn and curving rock shapes at the base of the canyon walls.
Fractured and sandstone canyon walls arch above a cottonwood tree with fall foliage
This is one of two photographs of this tree that I like. (The other is a in portrait orientation, and may give a better sense of the trees size and the relative scale of the huge sandstone canyon wall.) The tree grows in the bottom of the wash and right up against the canyon walls, with several arch shapes in the sandstone creating a sort of frame for it.
A solitary oak tree grows from a crack in Utah sandstone
This photograph comes with a bit of a personal story. In the morning we (a group of six photographers) had departed our camp on foot to hike down a nearby wash and drop into a deeper canyon. Although the morning began well, with a pleasant walk down the wash, followed by some exploration as we tried to find a good way to drop into the deeper canyon, I suddenly developed a knee problem — I decided to remain behind as the group went on. I walked back to camp, making photographs along the way, and then drove to some other places along our gravel road looking for other subjects. In the late afternoon I returned to camp, though no one else had yet returned. So I decided to do a bit of exploring near camp, and I ended up at the base of a sandstone face as the sun dipped behind mountains to the west — and I photographed this tree in the low light before heading back to camp.
On our first night together as a group in a back-country area of Utah we set up camp and then headed out to photograph something as the evening approached. We drove, ending up at a spot where large sandstone formations are backed by an even larger area of smooth sandstone surfaces, interrupted by potholes and other features. At one point we were in one of those locations where the number of obvious photographic subjects was limited — basically, there was a beautiful pothole with a true and there was this old snag. With six photographers, interesting questions arise. Do we all shoot the same subject? If one person shoots it first, is it OK for the next to photograph from the same angle? How could we each take this common subject and do something different with it? I initially resolved to not shoot this snag, but a bit later I came back and gave in to temptation! ;-)
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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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.
