After a particularly heavy snowfall in Northern Arizona, I headed down for a morning to see what was there to shoot around the Sedona area. Unfortunately, the snow level was right at 4200’, so much of the red rocks I wanted to shoot with the fresh snowfall were below the snow level (maybe next time!!). Oak Creek canyon, however, often sees much heavier snow than nearby Sedona because of the cold air which gets trapped in the canyon, locally lowering the snow level to the canyon floor. I headed back up the canyon and stopped at one of my favorite locations, and bushwacked down to the river. In over a foot of fresh snow, and flooding conditions, this took much longer than normal, but soon reached a particularly photogenic portion of Oak Creek (I have at least three other images in my galleries from this location).
I was amazed at what I saw when I reached Oak Creek. Major flooding from the previous week had torn many of the trees from the banks, and littered the area with pieces of tree debris. The area had been radically changed. (talking to someone who was there to witness the floods said that there were 90 foot pines crashing down and floating through Oak Creek at the time). At the moment I was there, a fresh blanket of white snow quietly covered the violence of the previous week. This image was an exercise in utilizing and managing the ‘positive’ negative space – that is, the white snow-covered area in the foreground of the photograph which holds very little detail. If you’ve looked through my galleries you’ll quickly realize that I love ‘negative’ space; that is, working with shadows as a fundamental part of the compositions I create. In this case, the negative space I was working with was white, which was uncomfortable for me at first, but soon grew to adopt this space as an integral part of the composition.