20-DEC-2006
Local bus, Sahara Desert, Morocco, 2006
Much of the Sahara Desert we traveled through was made up of hard black sand --miles and miles of it. There are no roads -- only tracks. As our Land Rover reached the crest of a hill, we saw this local bus weaving its way towards us across the desert. The “bus” is actually a large van, its roof overflowing with baggage and bikes. From this distance, it is incongruously diminished in scale by the vast desert it is crossing. I structured the image so that the track in the foreground leads us to a junction. At the junction, one set of tracks moves off the left into the sweeping curve that carries our eyes to the bus, while the other set of tracks veers to the right. Cross the Sahara is often a jouncing, dusty game of “following the track.”
18-DEC-2006
French fort, Sahara Desert, Morocco, 2006
The ruins of an old French Foreign Legion fort, dating back to the French protectorate in Morocco (1912) can still be seen in the Sahara Desert. A lonely pair of Acacia trees has incongruously taken root next to it. The textures of the desert draw the eye towards the trees, the focal point of the image. The wall of the old fort points to the trees as well. The explosion of their branches is echoed by the pattern of clouds behind them.
18-DEC-2006
Dawn on the dune, Erg Chebbi, Sahara Desert, Morocco, 2006
Berbers guide visiting tourists down Morocco’s highest Sahara Desert dune just after dawn. A series of rhythmically repeating patterns of shadow and sand carry the eye to the tiny figures, which give the scene a sense of incongruous scale. I’ve cropped the huge dune they are descending, implying that we may be looking at a vista that stretches as far as the eye can see.
Sunrise, Bryce Canyon, Utah, 2006
This is an abstracted vista. I try to show less and in doing so, say more about how I felt as I watched the sun emerge on the horizon. Using a spot meter, I exposed for the sun itself in order to hold the color in the sunrise. The rest of the image is in shadow, abstracting the glories of Bryce Canyon. Yet just as our eyes would search these shadows in life, they will search the dark two thirds of this frame for the story at hand. There are wondrous things in this vista, such as richly colored cliffs bearing hoodoos that resemble ancient castles by the dawn’s early light. Using a photoshop mask, I was able to bring out just enough of them to tease the imagination. And the human imagination is where expressive photographs can do their best work.
29-SEP-2006
Yellowstone Canyon from Artist’s Point, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 2006
In 1871, the great landscape painter Thomas Moran accompanied an expedition to Yellowstone and brought back a painting of this scene which you can see at:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/moran/moran_grand_canyon.jpg.html . His painting, along with the first photos made of the site by William Henry Jackson, (
http://www.eastman.org/ne/str090/htmlsrc3/m198160160002_ful.html#topofimage ) inspired the US government to protect thirty five hundred acres of the Yellowstone area forever. It would be the first American landscape painting by an American artist ever brought by the American government. I stood with my camera where Moran himself stood, on Artist Point, and made this image of the canyon leading to the mighty Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River. I’ve made my own “painting” of this iconic landscape vista, a blend of light, shadow, color, and scale achieved in both the camera, and later in Photoshop. It was not an easy vista to shoot. The sun was under cloud cover for most of the time we spent here. I was fortunate to see the sun for a few moments -- without sunlight falling on part of the canyon wall, there can no expression in this image. There was also positioning to consider. The scene changed as I moved along Artists Point, offering me a choice of how much river, canyon, and waterfall to include or exclude. There were also framing and composition decisions – where do I place the falls within the image, and how much of the canyon do I include or leave out? To answer such questions, I kept shooting until I found what I wanted. I had plenty of zoom range left to work with. In fact, twenty minutes after making this image, I would zoom out to a very long telephoto focal length (500mm) to abstract and stress the power of the waterfall itself (Click on the thumbnail at the bottom of this caption to see it.) However, for this longer view, I zoomed back to a short telephoto focal length (114mm) so I could put the falls into its breathtaking context. Yet even this view is far more abstract than Moran’s epic oil painting. He offers an atmospheric panorama, while I present a tighter view of a monumental scene. The scale of the huge waterfall seems small in comparison to the mighty canyon that surrounds it. There is no one right or wrong way to interpret an iconic vista such as this. Every photographer brings his or her own vision to bear on a vista. No two should be alike.
21-SEP-2006
Mountain vista, Arches National Park, Utah, 2006
To make sense out of this mountain vista, I used color contrast from layer to layer to speak of the change in climate and geology. I fill over half my frame with an anchor of richly saturated red earth, strewn with small boulders. Boulders are small rocks, while mountains are very large ones, so there is a measure of scale incongruity in this image as well. The top half of my frame offers a series snow capped peaks wreathed in clouds. Without those clouds, we would have no top for this image. The sun on part of the cloud echoes the sun on the distant snow.
20-SEP-2006
Mysterious clouds, Green River Valley, Utah, 2006
The plains of Utah can stretch as far as the eye can see, with only occasional mesas to break the monotony. These appeared on the horizon as we left Goblin Valley State Park and headed towards the Green River Valley. It is the cloud that made this scenic vista worth photographing. The mesas add a sense of scale incongruity and tell us how big this landscape really is. The large cloud, an inverted triangle, seems to hang over these mesas as if it was a message from a higher authority. I anchored the image with masses of foreground sage, and placed my horizon well below the center of the image to strengthen the sky. I darkened the sky and intensified the color in Photoshop later, providing greater contrast for the mysterious cloud that hangs over the scene. What makes this image so unusual is the shadow of the cloud – it falls on the smaller front mesa, yet the large mesa remains in full sun. That shadow provides a mysterious target for that mysterious cloud. A third cloud – a long narrow band – hovers just over the long mesa and helps draw the eye to the point where the two clouds and two mesas converge.
21-SEP-2006
Ancient landscape, Arches National Park, Utah, 2006
The pink tinged sky expresses the coming of a new day upon an old – make that very old – landscape. The towers of ancient rock are in partial silhouette, but many of them show one wall reflecting the light of the coming dawn. I anchor the image I flowering sage. Although the entire foreground is in shadow, there is enough color in the rocks and plants to tease the imagination and arouse the emotions. It is a scenic vista, yet also my interpretation of this strange and colorful landscape.
29-SEP-2006
Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 2006
We were in the Lamar Valley to look for the wolf packs that often prey on the bisons that dot the landscape. While we did see some wolves, at great distance, the bison were predominant. Although I had hundreds of bison available to photograph, five of them give me enough scale here to express just how vast the Lamar Valley is. I work this image into five separate layers to make sense of a vast scenic vista, using my long telephoto lens at 415mm to collapse the great distance between the five layers. The five bison provide that important scale context – they are incongruously small compared to the land they graze upon. I make the bison my base layer, and build the image up to a vast plateau or hillside layer that connects the bison to the aspens that crown the plateau. The next layer features that stand of aspens with long white trunks and clusters of glowing yellow leaves. The final layer is a vast hill that carries the eye up and beyond the image. It was on this hill that we saw the telltale moving spots: a roving wolf pack. They were so far away that the only way to see them was through a high-powered spotting scope. There was no way for me to photograph them, yet I was glad that their presence led us to the spectacular Lamar Valley.
26-SEP-2006
Vertical vista, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 2006
While most vistas are oriented horizontally, there are times where the vista is up and down instead of from side to side. This image is one of those up and downers. The famous Moulton barns at the base of the Tetons are often photographed at dawn. There were at least 25 or thirty other photographers there with us. Many choose to concentrate on the mountains and barn, but I placed my emphasis (more than half the image) on the sage, because of its color, texture, and warmth. I limit the amount of sky in the image because it was cloudless and without character. The barn is a transitional linkage for me, a man made object connecting the texture of the sage to the texture of the Tetons. My vista is about the varied textures of nature, large and small, in comparison to the texture of the newcomer – man – whose barn is comparatively new on the scene (about 120 years or so ago.) The whole scene is illuminated with early morning light – warm, and well defined in terms of the shadows it casts.
30-SEP-2006
Evening on the farm, Preston, Idaho, 2006
I give this scenic vista a sense of scale by including the flag and the windmill, preceded by the bushes in the foreground. The key to this image is the wonderful sky, with the long, balloon-like cloud as its focal point. The image proceeds, layer by layer, to reveal the nature of the subjects: grass, then bushes, then the only man-made objects, worked by the wind, finally all of it backed by the hills, mountains and clouds.
29-SEP-2006
Lamar Valley dawn, Yellowstone National Park, 2006
Once again, a scenic vista defines the presence of man within nature’s domain. The road is the focal point here. It begins at our feet with that bold white line winding away from us. Eventually, it carries us to the headlights of a distant car, which provides important scale contrast to this scene. The mountains – including the 9,500 foot high Druid Peak at the top of this image, seem much closer to us than they really are due to the 230mm focal length I use to make this image. The Lamar Valley does not look very much like the other sections of Yellowstone. We saw no geysers or smoldering hot springs up here. Somewhat off the beaten path in the far Northeast section of the vast National Park, it seems more open and less wild. However appearances can be deceiving. The Lamar Valley is home to the wolf, bison, and grizzly bear. This image, with its pinkish sky and purple hills, give us not only a sense of place, but also a sense of what it feels like to be here in the morning cold before the sun can warm us.