Rock Garden, Atmospheric Haze, Morning. Arches National Park, Utah. April 7, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of a rock garden of sandstone towers in morning light, backed by atmospheric haze and barely visible La Salle Mountains, Arches National Park.

So far, each time I’ve thought I was hitting the end of the photographs from my early April weeklong trip to Utah, I come up with another one… and another… and another. I still have a few more waiting to be posted, but those are photographs that I had already worked up but held off posting for one reason or another. This one, however, may be the final one to actually emerge from the collection of exposures from the trip. (But I make no promises! There is one more that features some reflected light inside alcoves in sandstone that still may work.)

This photographed ended up in black and white for several reasons. I was sort of leaning that direction when I made the exposure, since the color components of the scene were both difficult to work with and a bit less than exciting. In addition, I like the way that black and white can sometimes abstract the shapes of things, perhaps taking them a few degrees further from their “real” nature. I had stopped alongside the road between the Windows Area and Wall Street as I begin my exit from Arches National Park on my last morning of shooting there. There was a lot of haze, especially when looking into the light, as this photograph does. The backlit haze is thick enough that the snow- and forest-covered La Salle Mountains, which actually fill the upper part of the frame, all almost impossible to see, and the foreground features gradually lose contrast as they progress away from the camera. However, because the light is in front of the camera and coming from just out of the right side of the frame, the edges of the rock towers gain a bit of extra definition against that hazy background.

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.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.