“Two Highlands Peaks” — Soft light on green hills and two distant highlands peaks.
We came upon this scene while driving north from Ullapool, Scotland and then taking a diversion out toward the coast. (We were intrigued by signs promising that we would find blueberry scones, and we just keep going until we… ran out of Scotland at the coast! Sadly, we never found the scones.) We were traveling along some lowland valleys, and at the top of one short incline we looked back and saw this view. Initially the entire scene was shaded by clouds, but since it looked like sunny spots were moving across the landscape we waited until some of that light landed on the foreground.
“Lake Manly Shoreline” — From the shoreline of Lake Manly to distant desert mountains under morning clouds.
A spectacular cloud deck floated above Death Valley on this winter morning. While the clouds were a bit too thick to let brilliant sunrise colors develop, they created a very dramatic sky and its reflection on the surface of Lake Manly. The photograph looks north across the lake from its salty southern shoreline.
In other photographs of this subject I have tried to to fill the frame with sky and reflecting water. In this case I decided to include some of the salt-crusted shoreline of the lake in the foreground, and I used a wide angle lens in order to include more of the scene, and especially the sky.
“Utah Autumn Sky” — Early morning autumn sky at Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
This is an example of what you can find when you focus on “the other stuff” — things other than the main subject that you came for. The spectacular and other-worldly summits of Capitol Reef lie out of sight behind my camera position, I turned my camera 180 degrees the other way to encompass this scene. We see a vast (mostly) sandstone Utah landscape, with lenticular clouds above and autumn cottonwood trees lining a stream in the bottom of the valley.
This sky is also an example of that “other stuff” concept. We initially stopped at this point just before sunrise when those clouds were spectacularly colored by red and orange dawn light. That scene was remarkable, but here the sky color has faded almost completely, and the darker tones contrast with the red rock color.
“Cedar Breaks” — Eroded sandstone strata at Cedar Breaks National Monument.
Cedar Breaks seems to me a bit of an odd spot. It sits on the edge of a high ridge in Utah just south of the Brian Head ski area. While it is spectacular, it is small, and and out of the way, and I think that it gets a bit lost by comparison to the other iconic parks of the state. In fact, it wasn’t a primary destination for us either — it was near a convenient place to spend a few nights on our way between California and points east of here.
But what it lacks in size and fame, it makes up for in spectacular features. A gigantic west-facing gash cuts into the summit of a high plateau. (The difference between that gentle plateau and this feature is remarkable.) Rather than the gigantic solid masses of sandstone found in places like Zion, Capitol Reef, and Arches, here the terrain is softer and the strata seem thinner, giving it a very different character.
