Mike.D.Green's photostream  

This was taken near the volcanic caldera image I uploaded recently. I wanted to capture something which showed what much of the terrain in the valley is like and this relatively dense and repetitious area of scrubby grass seemed to do the job.

ADDENDUM: after a couple of the comments below (thanks for the pointers!) I should point out that, this being a more than slightly dry area (!), the grasses become evenly spaced as they're the survivors from the competition for the trivial amounts of water available. Also, this is another one which works best viewed large.

Locations for photography: Death Valley National Park, California

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NOTE: after the very helpful suggestions below, I've cloned the offending fence out, as well as realigning the ground and changing the title. Thanks to everyone who suggested crops and ways to fix this - very much appreciated and I think this version is an improvement, which is good news as I really liked this composition when I made it :-) The wire mesh fence /was/ on the right of the shot, where there's now a blank wall, right up against the trunk, and green.

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I thought I'd post something with completely determinate scale...

This tree is deep within the Canyon de Chelly, in eastern Arizona, a place I very much enjoyed visiting. The slight haze over this shot is snow - visible in the larger version - which fell near-constantly as we drove around the canyon, in and out of the shallow, sandy river, with a Navajo guide.

Needless to say, perhaps, that fence really annoyed me, though having spent several minutes looking for a composition which excluded it, I concluded that the green/orange contrast had something going for it.... still, I'd rather it hadn't been there! The canyon is full of ancient, native American artefacts (buildings and paintings) and many are protected from damage by fences; great if you're photographing the 1,000 year old buildings - they're not really very intrusive - but pesky when what I was concentrating on was trees.

I have a blog article specifically on this brilliant canyon to be published shortly.

Blog article on photographing the US south west desert

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This is on a different scale from my last image....

It's from Zion National Park, where I made a fair few studies of the wide variety of rock strata and patterns. Zion seemed to me to be 'all about rock', so I concentrated on that, rather than repeating the big, classic shots looking down the valley from various viewpoints.

I liked this for the ambiguity of scale - when I reviewed my images, I had to think for a couple of seconds as to what this actually was and how big it was! Oh - and I don't normally say this, but this really does work better large - I'm thinking of making a big print of it.

Blog article on photographing the US south west desert

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I think this may well be one of my last images from the US south-west which both contain sky and are of a large area. It's even a 'classic composition' perhaps!

This was captured just before dawn, right at the beginning of our trip. We had the entire salt flat at Badwater Basin to ourselves - brilliant, and what a fantastic place to watch the sun rise on what was, as it happens, my birthday. I don't know what it is about salt flats which so appeals to me; perhaps the vastness and colour, but I find them stunning and inspirational places to be!

Death Valley proved, not unexpectedly, to be my favourite of the National Parks we visited in the US south-west and I have a short blog item, linked below, covering my thoughts on the place.

Locations for photography: Death Valley National Park, California

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As I described in my last blog piece, I'm going to run out of 'big' images from my US trip fairly rapidly, so, in contrast to my last upload of the caldera in Death Valley, here's a tiny part of Antelope Canyon, Arizona.

I have a fair few 'normal' shots of the canyon, showing the sweeping walls and multitude of colours, but apart from the tumbleweed shot I uploaded a couple of weeks ago, this abstract is actually my favourite - I liked the steely blue-grey colour. I'll be publishing a new blog article about Antelope tomorrow, once I've finished writing it!

Antelope Canyon blog article - one piece of advice!

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