Zion Morning

This is the follow up to the Photography is Hard post and, as promised, it has a lot more images than that post had.  It probably has more words than I thought it would, but that is part of the learning process for me.  It was a worthwhile exercise and I hope it’s enjoyable for you as well.

This was the middle of the three photo sessions Ann and I had that day in Zion.  The first lasted a bit over an hour as the sun was rising around the Court of the Patriarch bus stop.  These images were taken from 9:00 with the first image to 10:46 with the last in the area around the Big Bend bus stop.  The last was a short, half-hour early afternoon session that we cut short due to the crowds.  

This was a typical photographing session in a new place that is visually interesting.  I usually try to make at least one image quickly, to get my gear out of the bag and to get any lingering hesitation out of the way.  In another way, though, it was a bit unusual.  I was surprised upon looking at them afterwards just how many different images there were.  Often, I’ll only make no more than a handful of distinct images of a place in a couple of hours time. Here, there’s 25 distinct images (fewer “subjects” though), and a couple of variations on an image, generally color and black and white.  (As I said, this was a learning process for me, thus the variations).  I guess that was due, in part, to the fact that we were well into our vacation and my eye was used to seeing things quickly by this point.  So I’ve decided to develop each of them for this post, so you’re getting the whole photo session.  

As we descended from the road to the riverside I quickly saw an image.  A flat but layered composition that had at its base a colorful bunch of grasses.

As I’ll often do (and you’ll see below more examples of), as I was making one image, I saw another image within that one, which I composed immediately thereafter.  This one isn’t so simple, or well structured.  Yet there was something about the chaos of the grasses, dead logs and riverside brush and trees that I found appealing.  

I then turned to look up-river and to work with the river as an element in the image. 

Changing lenses and orientation to further explore the scene. 

I then turned down-stream and started walking, quickly coming to this tree.  The trees here were interesting and you’ll see there’s a lot of them in these images.  For the most part I tried to keep my distance so as to include a bit of the incredible Zion landscape in them, but that wasn’t the case in every instance.  At least I didn’t go full Dan on them and get stuck photographing tree bark all morning.

Again, I was visually exploring the landscape, trying different types of framing . . .  

. . .

eventually getting a rather tight framing of the subject.  

After working a subject like that, it’s sometimes hard to know when to drop it and move on.  Fortunately I did, with, of course, another tree.

As I look at these images I realized that I was really just trying to become comfortable with the scale and relationships inherent in this part of Zion with the cliff walls and the vegetated river bed.

As I worked my way down the river (not very far actually), the relationships between the various elements began to change and I was able to incorporate some depth into the images. 

And this was the first of the images I though was worth really trying to push in black and white.

I guess I was fully aware that Ann and I were not going to be at Zion very long, so I wanted to make sure I really didn’t miss any opportunities by constantly changing lenses and framing with subjects.

At one point, the gap between the river and the road narrowed and there wasn’t much of a view to work with.  That led me to looking at the riverbed itself and offered a very different scale of seeing for a stretch.

It became images of the rocks and trees that survive the periodic river flooding, as well as the detritus that can be left behind.

Again, some images lent themselves to black and white as well as color.

And I stuck with that more intimate imagery of rocks and trees for awhile.

At some point you feel like you’re seeing the same thing over and over (like the first set of tree images) and you try to shake things up.  Fortunately, the sun had finally moved far enough to light the rock wall to our north so I looked up instead of down for the next image.

Again, it’s an image that has different qualities in color and in black and white.

As I continued down the trail, working my way through some river brush, there was a distant image of the river as it made its way through the canyon.

And a last effort at a fallen tree that seemed interesting at the time, but that doesn’t seem to quite work in either color or black and white.  My head’s still scratching on this one. It was at this point where I turned around, probably feeling like I’d exhausted the opportunities before me.

But on my way back up river, the sun topping the canyon walls suddenly gave me a different photographic world to work with.  One full of light and shadow. 

The contrast range of these images is amazing, something that film could never replicate.  And I took full advantage of it.

Even with the wonders of new digital sensors, it takes a lot of developing these images to make them read as my eye saw them.  

One of the habits to instill in my work-flow is to turn 180 degrees after I’ve made an image to see what’s behind you.  In part it keeps you constantly looking around, but the other purpose is to see what the lighting conditions are in the opposite direction, which can be very, very different.  In this case not so much, but it led me to make an image that best characterizes the environment we were working in.

I continued on my way upstream eventually revisiting a tree I’d spent time with earlier.  As happens all too often, I passed right by it on my way back to Ann.  Fortunately, I stopped and turned around to check, one last time whether I might have missed something.  I realized that I’d have to backtrack again because the light was giving me a very different image to work with.

It wound up that the tree would occupy a very good portion of my time that morning.  As I made my way backwards, I kept stopping to try and figure out how to best photograph those trees. 

To be honest, I easily recall having framed several images and then rejecting them as inadequate.  And I recall the frustration I felt as I worked my way to the trees, and then around them, and then back to where I’d started. The light just wasn’t right looking from the left.

Ultimately I wound up at my original positioning (Ansel said that 80 percent of photography is knowing where to place the tripod!) and decided on a fairly tight frame with the light and the angled walls to give the image depth.  It’s very close to the images I made earlier of the same standing tree and fallen branch, except this time the shadow and light give the image depth.

I finally looked upward and realized that it was possible to get a broader image that includes the greater landscape.

I think this is the image from that morning that best describes that part of Zion National Park.  

Not that it wasn’t worth working on all the other images (face it, I need to practice my developing skills somehow), but this is still the one image that seems right. Several of the others were better than I thought they were, but this last is the one worth showing.  

This and the water photograph from the last post.