Tag Archives: monument

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

A Story in Red Rock

November 28, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Broken rocks spread across a layer of sandstone in evening light

This is another photograph from my first evening on this trip in this particular part of Utah, from a day when I had met up with friends and traveled out to find a campsite where we would stay for the next few days — our base camp for exploring red rock and canyons and for sharing meals and conversation. After setting up camp and settling in, we headed out for our first evening of photography, and would up in a nearby landscape of sculpted sandstone.

We began shooting mostly together, finding and exploring some obvious and quite impressive subjects — each working on his or her own photographs but staying mostly in a group. Eventually we began to split up and wander off to do our own individual exploration. Later in the evening I ended up in an area of massive sandstone benches and ridges and potholes, and as the dusk came on and the light turned red/burgundy I was above a small sandstone canyon descending toward the sagebrush country below. This is a simple scene, but I like to think about a few secrets that it may reveal. It is easy to see such landscapes as being static, but the fact is that they are always changing, though mostly on a time scale that is much longer than that of our lives. But occasionally there are obvious clues, and here the clearest is the scattering of fractured rock that has failed from the seemingly solid face in the upper part of the scene, a hint about how it came to be that the lower flat surface runs into the upper wall.

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

Potholes, Dusk

November 26, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

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!

Photographs: Photographers

Working the Red Rock Landscape

November 23, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

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.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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

Canyon Cottonwood Trees, Autumn

November 20, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Cottonwood trees with autumn foliage fill the bottom of a red rock canyon near Boulder, Utah

After a week or so of camping out in a range of Utah locations, one of which was rather remote, I emerged from this backcountry of gravel roads and red rock and canyons and came back to the (relative) civilization of Escalante, Utah. Gas stations! Espresso! Restaurants! Even better, I had an appointment to meet my cousin and her husband over in Boulder, Utah… and dinner was on the calendar!

I arrived in Boulder a bit early, and having a bit of extra time I decided to use it by traveling out on the Burr Trail. I’ve been on that road a few times in the past, so I figured that it would be fairly easy to find red rock canyon walls and perhaps more cottonwood color. As I arrived at the first narrow section of canyon the road traversed the side of a ridge and offered overhead views looking down into the canyon and up a larger nearby wash. While elsewhere in the state I had seen a combination of green cottonwoods and other trees that were just about at peak color, here is seemed that the cottonwood color had already peaked, and instead of a wall of gold I saw a mixture of a few intense golden trees and many others that had lost leaves and exposed their trunks and branches. In this spot the trees lined up against canyon walls, and a nearby they marched off down the canyon.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: monument

A Story in Red Rock

Potholes, Dusk

Working the Red Rock Landscape

Canyon Cottonwood Trees, Autumn

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