The Road from Bryce

I honestly could post dozens more landscapes from Bryce, but I'm way behind on road trip photos -- so here we are, driving back the way we came from Bryce, backtracking a bit before we head to Arizona and Lake Powell.

Practical Posing

The hard part about walking around Bryce with two cameras and a bag of lenses is not the awareness that you are in some sense dooming yourself to wilt under the weight of a king's ransom in glass; it is that you are a target for every tourist who wants you to take their picture there. Fortunately, after three separate couples asked me to take their picture at inspiration point, they moved on to some other victim.

At Odds

Nice clouds once I made my way down into the canyon. :)

In the Canyon

While Betsy went on a (once again) much longer set of hikes, I did part of the more moderate Queen Victoria hike, which takes you down amongst the hoodoos to the canyon floor. I found that at Zion, you got a lot of the best views from the stops and near the trail heads (or close enough). At Bryce, my favorite vistas were actually when you got down in the middle of things.

I spent about half an hour playing with this B&W conversion, which reminds me of something I learned later on at a photo gallery in Santa Fe. Ansel Adams has this famous shot, "Moonrise Over Hernandez"[1]. Notice the dramatic, black sky? When I was in Santa Fe, I learned that Adams' first version of this print had a fairly light sky, with more clouds visible. Over the course of the next thirty odd years, he darkened and darkened that sky, and upped the contrast on the crosses in the foreground. The last print was starkly different -- so much so I almost felt like it was a different photo.

Any time I fall into a pit of despair about the minutia of processing an image, I'll just think of that story. Imagining spending a lifetime to get a print you wanted.

It's either very inspiring or very depressing.



[1] I also think this image is a great example of a photograph which is way better viewed on photographic paper than on an LCD screen. As much as we'd like it to be so, some things look better in print (or vice-versa!).

Hoodoo Country

The dominant feature of Bryce's landscape are the hoodoos, rock spires formed by erosion. They kind of remind me of being on Mars -- well, the pulp mars of golden age sci-fi, if not the real Mars. At any rate, the amazing thing about Bryce is these hoodoos -- and if the sun had actually come out more in the morning, they would have had this amazing glow.

This was shot from Inspiration Point[1], one of the many great places in Bryce where you can drive to and just walk up a little path to get a shot.


[1] Actually, the 'little path' was like three steep ascents up a path, which Betsy bounded up like a gazelle. I arrived about 20 minutes later.

Bryce is for Lovers

Bryce has this magical shot you can get if you're up before dawn and conditions are right. People who follow this blog can guess what happened: I got up before sunrise, and everything was super cloudy. Socked in, not a trace of color in the sky. Waited until sun crossed the horizon, and still nothin'. So, I went back to bed, and got this shot instead for what I saw for when I got to sunrise point.

The Gates of Bryce

I'm kind of fascinated by the people who work at tollbooths and gates. It's just seems like such a boring job, I would go nuts doing it (unless they let you have the internet -- which something tells me toll booth operators don't get). As a result, I've been trying to capture portraits/candids of these people as they work. This is the shot from the entrance to Bryce -- the ranger, fwiw, was incredibly helpful. And every national park we went to had a park newspaper, which left me with funny visions of park animals running a printing press.

The Road to Bryce

Bryce is quite near Zion, and is in fact just on the other side of a tunnel through the mountains. The climate, terrain, and vistas change drastically as you head through the tunnel -- a little like driving into a new world on the other side of the mountains.