16-NOV-2011
In transit, Suez Canal, Egypt, 2011
As our cruise ship slipped its way from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, I made this image from just above its bow with a 24mm wideangle lens. The resulting vista offers a striking contrast in colors. The blue and white ship, dark blue water, and powder blue sky all call attention to the brown sands of the surrounding Sinai Desert. It is the limitless desert scenery that dominates the image and best tells the story here. The Suez Canal is, in effect, a ditch through a desert. 30,000 slave laborers worked for ten years under brutal conditions to build it between 1859 and 1869. Thousands of them died on the project. When it was finished, it had a dramatic effect on world trade. Combined with the American transcontinental railroad completed six months earlier, the Suez Canal allowed the entire world to be circled in record time. It accelerated European colonization of Africa, as well as making travel between India and Europe much quicker. Much later, the canal would become essential to Europe’s oil supply, and a vital strategic objective to fought over during the 20th century. It was and still is a vast undertaking. The traffic is heavy – we keep our distance, but we were never out of sight of another ship, mostly oil tankers.
11-NOV-2009
The road, Monument Valley, Arizona, 2009
Visitors enjoy Monument Valley’s ultimate vista from a hotel known appropriately as “The View.” It is an iconic view, burned into the American consciousness by the films of John Ford and the images of generations of landscape photographers. As evening descended upon the valley, I made my own version from the hotel parking lot, building my vista around the road that snakes into the distance and then vanishes into a gulch. Three cars can be seen here, adding a sense of scale incongruity to the vista. The color seems almost too rich to be true, begging me to tone it down, yet this rendering is very close to the colors I actually saw before me.
24-JUN-2009
Fishermen, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 2009
As our ferry entered Victoria’s inner harbor, I noticed that people were fishing off the end of the breakwater. One of them stood out clearly against the sea, small in scale, yet as rigid as the light tower that looms over his head. The blue sky is filled with layers of soft horizontal clouds, contrasting to the precise alignment of the harsh, man-made concrete jetty. Ultimately, this vista symbolically expresses the role of mankind in the natural world – we may be small compared to the space around us, but our intrusion will leave a lasting footprint.
25-JUN-2009
Flight, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 2009
A seaplane climbs into the sky over our heads, leaving the city of Victoria in its wake. I made the plane seem very small by using a 28mm wideangle focal length for this photograph. Yet despite its small scale, the plane is still the focal point of the image because of its placement in center of the frame. I layer this vista with four levels of content, starting with the dark sea at the bottom, then the small strand of buildings on the edge of Victoria’s harbor, and on up through a layer of clouds to the utterly rich blue sky overhead. This visit is about flight itself – a small plane frees itself from the earth and soars above the clouds into a limitless blue void.
22-JUN-2009
Storm, Astoria, Oregon, 2009
Two details bring this stormy vista to life – the distant ship entering the Columbia River, and the gull positioned directly over the darkest cloud. They form a diagonal relationship that echoes the diagonal thrust of the receding banks of clouds slicing through this wideangle image. The ship is a huge object, yet when seen at such a distance within a setting such as this, it becomes a lesson in scale incongruity.
21-JUN-2009
Shipwreck, Fort Stevens State Park, Oregon, 2009
Dual scale incongruities give this vista its melancholy, timeless mood. The ship, which ran aground on Columbia Beach one hundred and three years ago, is dwarfed by the vastness of the sea and sky. Meanwhile, the remains of the ship loom large above a group of tourists who have come to view it at the edge of the sea. Both the ship and the tourists are seen in backlight, which abstracts them as silhouettes, more symbolic than real. A closer look at detail shows the tourists in various situations – some tend young children, others make pictures, or share the experience with their dog.
12-NOV-2008
Sahara Desert, near Tozeur, Tunisia, 2008
The Sahara here is flat and rocky, the sky is filled with small clouds laden with moisture, and the horizon seems to stretch forever. I made this vista with a 24mm wideangle lens, which magnifies the sweep of both sky and land. The early morning sun warms the image, adding a surreal quality to the scene.
18-MAR-2008
Sweeper, Might of Islam Mosque, Dehi, India, 2008
I shot from inside of the ruins of this mosque, India’s first, framing a vista of the courtyard within a doorway. The frame adds a sense of perspective to the vista, and intensifies the scale incongruity of the small sweeper working within a large space. The shadowy stone paving on the interior of the mosque adds further perspective by leading the eye to the frame.
26-MAR-2008
The Great Mosque of Fatehpur Sikri, India, 2008
A 175-foot high gateway -- the largest in Asia -- dominates a seven-mile long wall that encloses the Jami Masid, the great open mosque of Fatehpur Sikri, the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1571 to 1585. The city suffered a water shortage and was abandoned. To give this vista its sense of scale, I waited for people to move into the plaza. It took some time – no shoes are allowed here, and the stones of the ancient courtyard were scorched by the afternoon sun. Eventually two people, one of them with shoes in hand, made the trek through the pigeons across the hot stones. Their abstracted figures make the huge gate seem even larger.
09-NOV-2007
Navajo Reservation, Northwestern New Mexico, 2007
The Navajo homeland covers 26,000 square miles, occupying all of Northeastern Arizona and spilling over into Utah and New Mexico. Much of it looks like this -- high desert, buttes and mesas, and long roads lined with utility poles. I have built this vista around one of those poles. It brings to this scene a sense of scale and starkness, unfolding in a series of layers. An empty road offers a base layer, with the pole and its wires seemingly springing out of that road. The middleground layer extends all the way to the mesas on the horizon – a vast desert, devoid of human activity. A pale blue and gray sky fills the background layer, occupying two thirds of the image. This vista defines the nature of this place – arid, barren, alternately either very cold or very hot. This is home to the Navajo.
13-JUN-2007
Point Reyes National Seashore, California, 2007
Point Reyes National Seashore is a 70,000-acre nature preserve in Marin County, 30 miles north of San Francisco. It is home to whales, elephant seals, elk, raptors and shorebirds. This view is from the Point Reyes lighthouse. This sweeping vista vanishes into nothingness as the distant fog obscures both land and sea in the far distance. The repeating horizontal thrusts of the waves energize the image. They play against the vertical thrust of the beach and the hills at right. The beach becomes negative space filled with tension. Meanwhile, the blue and white of the sea contrasts to the dull brown and green beach and hills.
22-FEB-2007
Survivor, Leadfield, Death Valley National Park, California, 2007
A one building town is a perfect subject for a vista – and Leadfield fills that role. It was a gold mining boomtown founded on distorted advertising. In August, 1926, more than 300 people moved to Leadfield to get rich. They didn’t. In February, 1927, everyone departed. Today only one small building survives in Leadfield. I photographed it from behind with a 28mm wideangle lens, so that I could embrace it with the very hills that were supposed to provide instant wealth. The red paint on the building may be 80 years old, but it still vividly anchors the image and gives the scale incongruity the image requires to work as an effective vista.
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.
27-SEP-2006
The Firehole River, Yellowstone National Park, 2006
Heat colliding with cold shapes this vista – the hot thermal springs of Yellowstone breathing their mist into the chill of a last September dawn. The river itself runs around a curve at lower right, but it is the valley itself that takes star billing here. I use a row of pine trees as a screen in the middle left, their shapes echoing the plumes of steam. The huge hill behind this scene is covered with dead pine trees – a reminder of the real fire that swept through here in 1988. It is this interplay of live and dead trees, of make believe fire with the memory of real fire, that brings this vista to life in the imagination.
21-SEP-2006
Castle Rock, Moab, Utah, 2006
The great mesas and buttes of the American Southwest are timeless. My sepia vista of Castle Rock, shot from a mountain pass several miles away, makes the scene look as old as the first photographs of it. The distant hills in the far background fade away to white, just as they would in a 19th century image. The scene gradually fades in contrast and detail from front to back, as if we were going back in time to view the scene. I anchored the scene with a strong rock to the right, just as many 19th century photographers did in their own vistas. I rarely apply tints or colors to my images, but in this case, I feel the sepia form ages the content, and makes Castle Rock appear, as it would have looked to those who saw early photographic images of it in the 1800s. I cropped my picture into a long and narrow frame to add a sense of panoramic sweep.
23-SEP-2006
Afloat, Antelope Island State Park, Utah, 2006
Another way to create a memorable scenic vista is to abstract an incongruous subject. That is what I do here, exposing on a fiery sky to make the hills of Antelope Island and hundreds of water birds floating on the Great Salt Lake into black shapes. The sheer number of birds – with every last one of them floating calmly – is an incongruity, something we would never expect to see. I was stunned when I saw this sight, and still am. I placed the hills at the top of the frame to create imbalance and tension, playing against the incredible sense of peace in the water below. The long narrow frame carries us across the image, checking to see if every last bird is adrift.
20-OCT-2006
Dusk, Mono Lake, California, 2006
Mono Lake is ringed with ancient limestone towers known as tufa. I made this vista just after sunset, building it around five repeating horizontal layers. The branches of the bush at the lower right create my anchor layer – extended by the tiny branches emerging from the water just to the left of it. A thin layer of reflected clouds moving across the image provides my second layer. They echo the ripples in my third layer, created by a single grebe, the focal point of the entire image. The huge towers of abstracted tufa and their reflections make up the fourth layer, backed by a fifth layer of distant pinkish hills. All five layers are united by the repeating rhythms of the branches at the lower right and the tufa towers at upper left. The overall vista expresses a sense of tranquility in a surreal setting.