Tag Archives: wash

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

Utah Juniper, Sandstone Cliff

March 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A single Utah juniper tree in front of a sandstone cliff, Capitol Reef National Park

Shooting in this area of Capitol Reef National Park was a bit of a late-day whim. There had a been a bit of a slowing down of the photography earlier that day, and we almost felt a bit obligated to get out and do more photography in the evening. Hey, it happens! Feeling a bit less than inspired and with no specific goal in mind, we headed over to Capitol Reef and looked around, at first perhaps without a lot of enthusiasm. If you are a typical photographer, you have probably had such a day – the light doesn’t seem great, there are unfixable challenges with the location, and you just aren’t “seeing” it.

Eventually I thought it would at least be worthwhile to head up into a nearby canyon that I had visited before. We got out and prepared to walk up the canyon a ways. Before we did so, I saws this tree at the top of gravel hill at the base of the vertical sandstone cliffs and recalled that I had been interested in it when I have visited this spot once before. By now it was pretty late in the day, and the light shining through the thin overcast was bouncing off of canyon walls behind me and gently reflecting towards the wall behind this tree.

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

Cottonwood Trees, Courthouse Wash

February 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Autumn cottonwood trees along Courthouse Wash and sandstone towers, Arches National Park

After a second visit to Arches National Park and a few days into that visit, I was beginning to be able to see past the main, iconic towers and arches and other sandstone structures. This takes a while. When visiting a new location, it is natural and, I think, even a good idea to go with the icons at least a bit. They are, as the saying goes, icons for a reason. While I cannot say that I’m yet close to knowing this park nearly as well as I would like to, on this morning I began to feel that I was beginning to see past the main features a bit more. (Though I confess that I did begin the day shooting one of those well know features.)

As we drove out on the main road, I quickly noticed the beautiful cottonwood fall colors down in the bottom of Courthouse Wash. Shortly after crossing a creek bed, we pulled over and I wandered off to photograph these trees. Before I finished here, I had tried a number of different approaches to the subject – shooting mixed brown and yellow leaves collected on the ground beneath them branches silhouetted against morning sky, and here the backlit trees with some of the characteristic red rock towers beyond.

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

Autumn Leaves, Sand

January 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn oak and box elder leaves lie on the pink sand in the bottom of a wash, Zion National Park

The thing that most often first catches my attention in the bottom of slot canyons, such as this small one in the Zion National Park high country, is the way that they twist between closely spaced vertical walls. There is virtually nothing quite like this in our experience. But the thing I notice first is not necessarily the thing I remember most. I often wonder how others might regard my photographs, since I know that they cannot share the full context of the images that I know from being in these places. (I’ve often said that we, as the photographers, are perhaps the least able to see our own work objectively, since we cannot easily put aside these non-photographic things that are no longer present in the purely visual medium within which we work.) When I think of these canyons I think of the sound, often deadened by the sand and perhaps by vegetation, and of the feeling of the air, which always different from the feeling of the air outside the canyon – most often cooler when the “outside” air is warm but also warmer when the canyon provides shelter from cool-season winds. And it those canyons with water flowing through them, there is the constant, though often gentle sound of water flowing and trickling.

I also usually end up slowing down and looking at many small things that might not first be seen – the leftover pattern of water than may have flowed through weeks or months earlier, place where the sand has been marked by the passage of a small animal or by grass moving across its surface in the breeze, the mixture of rocks that must have come from distant places, plants growing in odd cracks in the rock, patterns in the rock walls, the passage from one rock layer to another, and more. On this fall day it had been windy and lots of autumn “stuff” was littering the canyon floor, which here was pink sandstone sand, further colored by the glowing light reflected from the red rock canyon walls.

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

One Green Leaf

January 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

One green leaf on a bed of brown and tan autumn leaves in a desert wash, Capitol Reef National Park

My two October trips to photograph in Utah extended my ongoing education about the place, and one of the locations (but not the only one!) about which I had and still have the most to learn is Capitol Reef National Park. When I first was there in April of 2012, my encounter with this park was perhaps shamefully superficial, though my excuse is that we were only passing through on our way to another place. All I saw of the park was the short highway drive that passed by the Fruita District as it passes through the park – the rest of the park beyond this small bit remained a complete mystery to me. In October I was there twice. On the first visit I was in the area enough to start to get a bit of a feel for the place, though I mostly still stuck to the most popular and accessible areas, with the addition of a bit of hiking and a long drive on gravel roads down the less-visited side of the park. On the second visit I learned and saw a bit more – enough to convince me that there is much more to this park and that it is a place I want to return to.

Although there is no evidence of this in the photograph, this shot was made in a short slot canyon in an out-of-the way area of the park. We drove there on a very cold morning and heading into the canyon while the temperature still hovered around freezing. There was no one else there at all, and we barely even saw anyone else on the long drive to get there. The little canyon itself was quite beautiful and full of interesting surprises – juxtapositions of glowing red-orange walls and shaded blue-purple walls, brilliantly colorful gambel oak leaves, large sandstone faces and walls, and more. As I investigate a place like this I try to let my eyes roam beyond the first things I see, and try to also see smaller things that could easily be missed. Here I happened to look down at my feet – sometimes a good thing to do! – and see that the floor of the stream bed was in places carpeted with oak and other leaves that had recently fallen, and this batch of brown and tan leaves held one that was still green.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: wash

Utah Juniper, Sandstone Cliff

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Cottonwood Trees, Courthouse Wash

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Autumn Leaves, Sand

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One Green Leaf

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

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