While waiting for my son to join me, I could not resist walking around the desert area surrounding my Utah campsite, capturing desert scenes with my iPhone camera.
I regret that I can’t find the poetry to describe these desert scenes. I’ve noted a few of my photography contacts on Flickr suddenly waxing poetic in a manner that suggest AI generated text. I have to admit, I’ve thought about that, but I’ve not yet given in to that temptation.
Thanks for following and stay tuned for more Utah desert scenes,
I made numerous images of this and other nearby Prickly Pear flowers. I think this is my best shot.
And to back track a little, I had stopped along the gravel, backroad into the park to check out a possible area for late day photography and noted the numerous and varied wildflowers at the side of the roadway. the sun was high in the sky, so the lighting was not highly favorable for shooting the wildflowers, but I did so anyway using the camera in my iPhone.
Though my iPhone identifies this yellow wildflower with many petals as a ‘Common Dandelion’, these don’t look like the dandelions that commonly grow in my Texas lawn. So maybe Texas does not have ‘Common Dandelions’?
I thought this wildflower was a form of the Texas Primrose, commonly referred to as a ‘buttercup’. Not so, according to my iPhone, which says it is ‘Field Bindweed’. The flower petals open more flatly than do those of the Texas Primrose.
And while the current topic is wildflowers, there are many in the Badland National Park. In my scouting stops along the main roadway through the park, I photographed many.
As I was shooting the triple arch of the previous post, I noted an old tree on the sandy ridge below the arch. Readers will already know that I have a fondness for gnarly old trees.
This one reminded me of a weird looking creature crawling along the ground. After taking the photo above, I noted some interesting features of the tree that reinforced my impression that this looked like an unusual creature.
Tree Creature Eyes
This feature looks like eyes of a mysterious creature.
Tree Creature Eyes – Black and White VersionTree Creature Face
For landscape images it is best to make simple images with no distracting clutter. In a forest it is virtually impossible to avoid clutter. Trees and grasses grow in a mass of seeming disorder. Limbs and twigs stick out everywhere, the forest floor is covered with all kinds of natural debris, grasses and low growing plants, fallen trees and limbs. Still, I try to carefully consider what is in my composition. Sometimes I can exclude something that I consider particularly distracting, many times I just have to accept what is there and try to compose so that a viewer can get the intended message.
Star Burst Aspens. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 26mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 200.
Sometimes, isolating details, either via zooming in or cropping in post processing, works to eliminate clutter, but context may be lacking, if that matters.
Aspen Leaves. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/100s, f/11, ISO 250Cradled. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 70mm, 1/80s, f/11, ISO 500.Forest Floor and Shadows. Nikon D850, Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, 1/100s, f/11, ISO 250.
The chaotic nature of a forest may be the message.
Yellowstone National Park is a truly amazing and one of a kind natural wonder. I’ve only passed through it briefly on a couple of occasions, when the primary objective was Glacier National Park in Montana. Yellowstone and Grand Teton were in the road travel path, so passing through those, it made perfect sense to utilize a stop over at one or both of those parks on the way to Glacier and back.
Spending only a day or two in this very large park in no way allows one to see all that it has to offer; but it is possible to see most of the commonly visited sites. In addition to the really big features and geysers, there are small features that are interesting and hardly ever mentioned and I expect not observed closely by most visitors.
This post is about one of those minor features, which can be observed from the safety of board walks. There are areas where the hot water and steam escaping from underground creates mud puddles that are dynamically pulsing, but in a much smaller way than the eruptions of the major geysers.
It is fun to watch these tiny eruptions of mud spewing just a few inches into the air. The expelled mud takes on random, fleeting, geometric shapes. These shapes can be captured in photographs, if one has patience to spend a few minutes observing and learning how to time shots. I think the best approach is to watch and anticipate the eruptions and shoot in burst (continuous) mode with a fast shutter speed, capturing a quick series of images during the eruption. Thumbing through the images one may find really interesting and intriguing shapes.
Here are a couple of the best ones I managed to capture in the few minutes I had to observe and shoot.
Mud Geyser. This eruption produced a linear series of geometric shapes.Mud Alien. This small mud eruption took on this whimsical shape that appears to have an alien looking face.
These small features are so fleeting that one usually does not have time to mentally process the shapes as they appear and evolve so quickly, but photographs freeze the shapes, allowing for a greater appreciation of natures temporary artwork.
So, if you get a chance to visit Yellowstone, enjoy the big geysers and colorful pools, but don’t forget to observe the smaller events.
