I arrived at the train station earlier than expected and had about forty minutes before Gina and JD were getting in. This was a great opportunity to walk around and explore with my camera. It was a perfect autumn morning in what has turned out to be the most enjoyable October ever (unless you are a plant or a lawn). The air was pleasantly warm, with the most gentle of breezes. The sky was clear blue, punctuated by quickly moving clouds.
I made my way across the street to a building I have seen for many many years. And it has always attracted my photographic curiosity. But, for the first time, I was on foot with a camera, and not in a car speeding to the parking garage to catch a train.
I made many images from different angles with different compositions. It was exhilarating seeing the patterns the clouds made in the sky and on the building. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, my forty minutes was gone as my phone lit up with texts from Gina telling me they waiting!
This occasionally happens when I am photographing... time just flies past without me even noticing. Forty minutes, or an hour, or even more speed by in what feels like no time. I get lost in the subject and the process of making photos. I think it is this total immersion that sometimes happens that is a big part of the enjoyment of photography for me.
Sometimes it happens... I really liked this image the second I made the exposure. But even today, I'm not sure exactly why I like it so much, I just do. We have a large framed print of it hanging in the upstairs hallway of our house. The photography magazine "Elements" contacted me after seeing this image posted in their online group and they are going to publish it in their next issue. And it received the most feedback of any image I posted in a photography forum online.
But not everyone likes it. A friend said it was nothing special. He had seen several others similar to this that I have made in the past and this one just didn't do anything for him. I won't name names... that wouldn't be right. Let's just say... he was my college roommate, lives in New Jersey, spends too much time with us, is terrible at Pickleball, and doesn't know anything about photography! :)
If I told you the location, you'd say "you went there and this is what you took photos of?" The location doesn't matter for this image. And it's not an exotic looking landscape from the canyons of Utah like the last image I shared. It's simple, and calming. It's the light and the gently rolling fence reaching up to the brooding clouds that makes this image interesting for me.
I have some more images to share in the coming months as I catch up working on them and selecting the best. I may share one more from my Utah trip in May, and I have several to share from a two week trip Marilyn and I took to England and Scotland. And then I have some interesting local images I might share.
Seems I'm making some new images again!
I couldn't resist sending one more blog post on White Pocket. This is from a trip I made to Utah earlier in May of this year. As you may recall, we drove for three hours, the last hour through deep sand, just to get to this location. On the afternoon we arrived we were sandblasted by fifty mph winds as we hiked over the rock formation. And we spent the night sleeping in the Jeep, wearing every article of clothing we had, barely able to keep warm.
The next morning, sixty minutes before sunrise, I started walking back towards the rock formation and saw something I had never witnessed before. A group of eight photographers were walking out of the landscape near sunrise. Out! Their back turned away from the beautiful pastel colors of the rocks. It turns out this was a group that spent the entire night on the rocks doing night sky and Milky Way photography.
I walked toward the pastel colored rock formations and made this image within twenty minutes of arriving. The harsh sunlight of yesterday was gone and a pale blue colored the surface of the white rocks. It was amazing how soft and different everything looked. I made this image and then kept walking and exploring, making more images along the way. As the sun came up, the light and colors quickly changed and it didn't take long for the harsh light of day to return. I am starting to prefer this pre-dawn, blue hour, light. It's very calming and peaceful. The only problem is that it comes even earlier than sunrise!
I have released the Southern Utah Gallery Page on my website. Click that link to get there and view a small collection of images from white Pocket, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, the canyons of Escalante National Monument, and a return hike on the Fairyland Loop in Bryce Canyon.
In May, my friend Rich and I made another pilgrimage to Utah for some hiking and photography. This is the seventh time I've been to Utah to hike and there are still so many things I haven't seen. There are five National Parks in the state, but you could make an argument that the entire southern half of the state should be a national park.
Since we had been to all of the national parks in Utah, this time we concentrated on staying off the beaten path. We traveled along dusty, sandy, one-lane roads; we hiked through canyons; we spent sunrise in the sand dunes; and we slept in our rented Jeep one night. Why?
The centerpiece of our trip was a visit to a place called White Pocket. And yes, I know this is really just across the border in Northern Arizona. It took us three hours to get there and the last hour was on a narrow, very deep, sand road. I spent that last hour gripping the wheel tightly hoping we wouldn't get stuck, and hoping the few Jeeps coming from the opposite direction would get out of my way so I wouldn't have to pull over and risk even deeper sand.
We made it by mid afternoon and arrived at the most beautiful rock formation I have ever hiked on. Of course we had to contend with fifty mph wind gusts sandblasting our skin and making it very difficult to get sharp photographs. We hiked, explored, and photographed in the late afternoon, culminating in the photo above. After that, it was time for dinner in the Jeep (you guessed it... chicken in a can!) and then some sleep before doing another hike and photo session at sunrise.
After a freezing night of sleeping in all the clothing and jackets we had, a hat and gloves, under two heavy blankets, we went back out for sunrise. The soft pale colors before the sun came up made the place look completely different.
White Pocket is an amazing place to visit. It's hard to get there, but so worth it! Look for more images from the rest of the trip in upcoming blog posts.