“Virgin River, Zion Canyon” — The Virgin river flows past trees and sandstone formations, Zion National Park.
Judging from the muddy water, a substantial amount of Utah landscape appears to be disolved in the Virgin River and flowing out of the park! A walk through the bottomlands of Zion Canyon reveals a riparian landscape subject to periodic flooding. Seeing this, you can begin to understand the role that water has played in forming this remarkable landscape.
On this morning we left our vehicle behind, shouldered photographic gear, and crossed to the far side of the canyon and the river, then followed a trail upstream. It was quiet and there was a lot to see, including a lovely little waterfall at one point.
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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 is a California photographer 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
Golden light reflects on the muddy winter flow of Redwood Creek as it flows over boulders and new late-winter growth.
Even in this dry year in Northern California, there is finally water running in the creeks of the redwood forests. I arrived fairly early on this early March day, looking for trillium flowers. (Although they are not the subject of this photograph, I did find those flowers later on this visit.) As I walked up the trail to enter this park, the sun had risen but it was too early for its light to make it down to the forest floor or to the creek. However, the reflected light of the sun hitting trees high overhead was turning the water a sort of golden brown color, which contrasted in a striking way with the bluish light on the rocks and in some of the shaded areas of the water. New spring (though that season was still several weeks away) growth was coming up everywhere, including in shallow areas of the creek such as this one.
Because I could not get right down to the creek here, I actually photographed this with a fairly long telephoto lens. I had to look around carefully to find a spot where there was enough of a break in the foreground vegetation to provide me with a gap to shoot through. I was also lucky that the plants were not moving a lot in the creek, since the exposure time was surprisingly long – there isn’t a lot of light down in the bottom a canyon through the redwood forest!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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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