“Morning Mountains, Skye” — Soft atmosphere and clouds above the Cuillin Mountains, Isle of Skye.
On our final morning on the Isle of Skye back in May, as we drove to leave the island and head north, we came to an overlook of the Cuillin Mountains — or “Cuillin Hills” or “The Cuillins,” as they are sometimes known. These are high (for Scotland) and rugged peaks famed for their climbing opportunities. The range is composed of the higher Black Cuillins, rising to the right side of this image, and the Red Cuillins, which include the large peak at the left.
“Distant Mountains, Reflection” — Manly Lake reflects distant mountains and morning haze.
The scale of Death Valley is monumental. It is one of the few National Parks where you encounter distances so great that faraway features disappear into the light and haze. The absence of familiar reference points like trees makes it harder to comprehend these distances. It is perhaps a mile to the nearby hills in this photograph, but the distant mountain range is many tens of miles away.
We arrived before sunrise to photograph the colorful dawn light. Later I turned my camera away from the main scene and back toward these hills whose forms were reflected in Lake Manly. Beyond, the distant Amargosa Range glows softly through the haze in the early morning light.
“Slot Canyon Narrows” — A very narrow and deep section of a Utah slot canyon.
This is the sort of slot canyon “narrows” that most of us imagine when we think of these places. You can literally touch both walls while walking though, and in places the space was just wide enough for me to pass. (I had to be careful to not bump my tripod-mounted camera as I walked through.) In person, such narrow and deep canyons are darker than we render them in photographs, but the light is very soft and beautiful.
I am sort of embarrassed — yet in a way also sort of proud — that I arrived at this place more or less by accident, and not by the usual direct route. I was out “poking around” in this area, and on a hunch I started hiking down an open canyon which soon narrowed into a slot canyon. Eventually I arrived at a junction in the canyon, where this very narrow slot intersected the main canyon.
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“Pine Forest, Evening” — A High Sierra pine forest in soft evening light.
This is an example of what a photographer friend has called “quiet photographs.” There’s no astonishing sunset, no peak piercing the clouds, no spectacular waterfall… just a quiet scene of the sort that characterizes much of our experience in the wild. I love those over-the-top astonishing moments, but I equally love the quiet, still moments and scenes like this one.
This particular scene is along the edge of Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park’s high country. No one else was there (hard to believe?) and the sun had just set. These trees, the ubiquitous lodgepole pines, stand near the edge of the the open meadow, and the meadow hasn’t entirely given up to them yet, as you can see from the open spacing of the trees and the short green foliage along the ground.
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