One of my new Very Favorite Places in the Red Rock Country is Snow Canyon State Park in Washington County, Utah. It is an amazing world of lava flows and eroded sandstone formations with an accompanying realm of petrified sand dunes to hold it all together.
Looking out across the flows of rock, I spied an amazing interface where thinly piled layers of stone appeared to have been compressed and twisted by some unimaginable forces along a sinuous axis into layer upon layer of icing on a great lithic cake. I could only guess at the land that had existed for these formations to come to exist: a river of rock.
A focal length of 300mm, clearly medium telephotoland, gave me the narrowed angle-of-view, magnification and compression that I wanted to express here, with the line of layered rock winding through the landscape. An aperture of f/20 from the camera-to-subject distance provided depth-of-field; and a shutter speed of 1/20 second at ISO 200 gave me an overall medium exposure.
Utah has some amazingly beautiful state parks, I am always befuddled that the politicians of the state seem to want to privatize so much of the wonderful federal public lands with which they have been blessed for the sake of money. For this lack of forethought I have no explanation save power and greed. I can only hope that the good citizens of Utah will persuade them otherwise.
Don, this is terrific. It is sinuous paintbrush marks. It is whipped butterscotch. It is petrified geological time. Wonderful, thanks.
Hey Ray, thanks very much for joining me for this discussion. It’s always good to have your thoughts and observations about the work I create. This Image is, indeed, petrified geological time, layer upon layer. I was a couple hundred feet above this formation when I noticed it for the first time. The individual sandstone layers were like multiple layers of icing on a giant cake, but then I saw the sinuous turns and twists that had somehow formed as the layers had been contorted by earth-forces that were beyond my imagining. I still have no answer for the origin of the uplifted s-curve. When I return to the Southwest, I will definitely revisit Snow Canyon with a much time to spare as I can afford. You might think about joining me in some of these magical lands.
A beautiful immortal Phoenix feather! A whale bone? It is definitely a fun abstract. A beautiful find. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Nancy T. I’m glad to hear that you are home safely and soundly from your whirlwind Holiday. Only you could imagine the descriptions you have shared. Wonderful! As I indicated in my response to Ray’s comment, this was really a fortuitous discovery. I was scrambling around on some red rock formations above this one when I just happened to notice all the layers and curves below me. and knew that telephoto-land was the only way to adequately express them. It was a fun time and I could have stayed much longer, but there was a airport calling me. I will get back one of these days. I’ll call you this weekend for certain. Walk in Beauty
Thank you both for being such wonderful parts of my photography family. I really appreciate your wonderful and timely observations and your sharing them with everyone. As it appears at present, I will be leaving WNC near the end of February and heading north to begin the interviews and image creation for the book project. There is much to be done, but I think I’m making slow progress toward that end.
I hope that in the coming week I will begin learning the craft of videography required of YouTube bloggers. Take good care and be safe.