Intimate Landscapes in the Utah Badlands

So super excited to be back in the in the Utah Badlands. Came here for the first time two years ago with my friend and we're here again now leading a tour here with a with another American photographer Nicholas Warner. It's just it's just such an amazing place for photography. There's so much to shoot here and just the landscapes everywhere you look really take your breath away. We've got incredible full color, you can see behind me, and just these wonderful landscapes. Now, Utah is a place of big epic landscapes. You've got these messes that rise up out of the planes and just scenes that seem to go on and on and on. There's so much scale here. But despite that, one of the things that I enjoy shooting most in this place are intimate landscapes, more telephoto close-ups or abstract scenes. There's so much variety in the landscape here. From the from the yellows, the color in the trees to the different textures and shapes and colors that you get in the incredible geology here in the landscape here, the different rocks, it really lends itself to much more intimate scenes. Closer frames tighter with a telephoto. But these scenes can be some of the most challenging to compose. Just small movements make a huge difference compositionally. But I also think it's incredibly rewarding because you can find scenes that are have not necessarily been shot before, something that's very much your own. So, we're going to be in Utah for about two weeks. We're here in the Badlands. We're going to be down in Mexican Hat. We're going to be over in Moab. I'd really like to work on putting together a collection of landscapes from those different places and making the most of the incredible fall color that we've got right now. I was quite surprised that we still had four color. It had stayed quite late in the year and it was at its absolute peak with incredibly vibrant yellows and oranges. Now, these kind of conditions give you an opportunity to really punch into the composition with a telephoto and make abstract images that just fill the frame with the leaves and with color. The trunk of the trees is working as a contrast and lines the eye can follow through the image to give it structure. Alternatively, the yellows contrast beautifully with the red rock. So I was looking for ways to isolate single or groups of trees against the rock and then compose quite tightly to cut out the sky which would just distract from the color contrasts of the rock and the leaves. this. place in the Badlands is just mind-blowing. We came here two years ago for the first time. It was a spot that we hunted down and we worked out its location on on Google Maps. We've come back here now with the workshop to bring the group here and it's just this fascinating arrangement of of bentonite. A bentonite is this is this kind of clay or rock that's multicolored. You don't really see it super well when the sun's shining on it, but there's lots of reds and purples and blues and whites here. When this really really starts to become special is after the sun's gone down, you get the blue hour, the light evens out and then the colors start to pop. But there's only really about 40 or 45 minutes of of that ambient light that really work. And after that, it gets a little bit too dark to shoot and the colors don't really show up so well. Now, you can see here you've got this pyramid that does work quite well as a wide shot. I've shot this with a drone. I've shot this with my regular camera quite wide. But what really works for this place are intimate landscapes. So just focusing on the color, the line. You've got lots of intersecting diagonals here. You've got gullies that kind of weave their way through the rock. And then when you shoot with a drone, you get the drone up and look straight down. Cut out all the sky. And then focus just on the line and the color and the shape. So just looking for the way that the lines weave through the frame, looking for different orientations of color, color patterns, things like that. Now, like all intimate landscapes, small movements, small adjustments make a big difference. So if you're in a drone, there's a big difference depending on how high you are, what your height is, whether you point the camera straight down or whether you point it down at an angle. So what you find because of that is there are just infinite compositions here and you can just do so much shooting in such a short period of time. But what this really needs is the light. It really is about the light. It's hard to see now because the the contrasts are too harsh. But what we find is that the compositions reveal themselves with the light. So when the light works, it becomes much easier to see what's going to work, what's going to not work. The colors of the bentonite here are incredibly photogenic, but they can also be incredibly chaotic and confusing if not properly composed. So what I was doing here is flying through the area looking for parts of the landscape that have a particular flow or balance. Things like repeated patterns or sometimes focal points that you can build an image around. Balance and harmony is important to avoid the images from just feeling completely chaotic or confusing. And I found that the higher I flew, the more chaotic the landscape was because it just included more of it. So getting lower and focusing on smaller patterns and shapes worked better for me, ensuring that there was some kind of symmetry in the landscape or that the shapes made by the different colors created [music] some form of directional flow. >> [music] [music] [music] >> This is a very very big landscape and it's typical of what we've been seeing a lot here in Utah where you're standing on the edge of a meza with a huge drop and then this just incredible vista, this massive scene that rolls out in front of you. Um, and it seems counterintuitive to be in a place like this and to be shooting intimate abstracts, but there's a couple of reasons for that. I I got here tonight and it's just it's very hard to show it. You've got these canyons wrapping around where the river flows in the distance. You've got Monument Valley and then all of these uh these trees and and interesting formations on the cliff edge where we're standing. So, intuitively, I want to shoot it really wide to get a foreground to get all these sweeps of the valley in leading all the way back up because we've had quite an interesting sky tonight. But it was it I just couldn't make it work. I couldn't connect all the different elements together. The foreground didn't connect with the background. The background monument valley is stunning, but it's not prominent enough when you shoot at wide angle. It just becomes very small in the frame. It's not really a strong subject to pull your eye towards. And then the area down here, even when it was lit, your eye kind of temp tended to trip up on that. While it's an amazing scene and standing here, it really does take your breath away cuz it is just epic to be here. It's not a scene that I could really make work in in one wideangle frame. I couldn't really make a grand scenic here. So I switched over to the telephoto lens because right at the back there where you can see Monument Valley which is just this wonderful collection of bees and spires there was some incredible diagonal sunlight. It was just this break that we've had in in the cloud which lasted for maybe 2 minutes and the light was coming sideways from a diagonal. There was a lot of dust on the horizon which was separating the bees from the actual horizon and it just worked really really well. Right now, it's if I pointed my camera at it looks very flat and two-dimensional, but because of the light and because of the the shadow in the foreground, because of the angle of the light and the and the dust that we were getting along the edge of the be, it really did make a fantastic intimate landscape. It's very far away. I had to shoot it with a 200 millimeter lens. But for me, that kind of communicates the scale of this place in a way that I was completely unable to do with a wide angle lens. All around the Utah [music] Battlelands, you'll find these wonderful shell ridges that rise up to meet the tall messes. Here, the foreground is just mud and so wide angle lenses from ground level just aren't really an option. Even intimate abstracts with a telephoto lens are relatively limited as you're limited to shooting straight out onto the sides of the meza. Now, I found some interesting repeated patterns here, but as soon as you get an aerial perspective from a drone, then the photographic opportunities just become limitless. Now, I did do some grand scenic shots here, and they do work quite well. But in this video, I really want to focus on just talking about intimate landscapes. Now, this place is very different from previous locations, as I wasn't working with color. It's just flat monochromatic landscape with very regular lines and shapes. Because of this, I found that the images looking vertically down didn't really work very well. They lost all depth and felt very flat. So, I prefer shooting at a 45 degree angle to the ground to keep the three-dimensionality of the scene. The challenge here is not just filling the image with lines, but trying to find harmonious arrangements of the ridges and tiny streams that give the eye a coherent line to follow through the scene. So I was looking for diagonals where the lines would start on one side of the frame and finish before reaching the other side or these kind of valleys where the lines leads to the top and back of the scene. So, one of the things about shooting more intimate landscapes or or abstracts in this kind of landscape where which is so big and so vast is that there's just so much to shoot. There's so many different compositions that it's almost overwhelming. We're at this bentonite area today. You can see behind me these incredibly colorful hills and reds and magentas and and whites. And it's such a big area and it really does lend itself to intimate landscapes because you can see all around me it's just this kind of desert scrub. It's very flat. This doesn't really work with a wide angle. There's no real features in the landscape to make strong subjects, but you have these incredible pretty colors and patterns and shapes. And that's what really works for these kind of intimate shots, particularly from top down aerials. But with many landscape compositions, usually it's about finding a particular composition, a subject, and a feature, setting up and sitting and waiting for the best light with kind of minor adjustments to the composition. Zoom in a little bit, zoom out, move to the right or left, and change your foreground. But there are so many different variables with aerial photography. Things like the altitude makes significant changes, the angle of the gimbal. Uh and then of course the orientation of the drone to the landscape. So there's a lot to shoot. There's a lot to a lot to think about uh to try to find compositions that work because the landscape all looks great, but that doesn't necessarily get make mean that it's going to make a coherent harmonious image. So what I'm looking for is lines and shapes, things that that work and flow through the image. So leading lines, shapes that frame the image or certain elements that stand out as a as a particular subject matter that you can build the image around. And yeah, so there's just a lot there's a lot to do here. There's a lot to shoot. So yeah, I'm not quite sure how many of these images are going to work. I'll know that when I when I look at the images better on a laptop screen rather than on a camera screen, but I know that I've not called the drama and epic scale of the landscape. But that's not what this kind of photography is about. This is all about simplicity and harmony and just making images almost don't have context that just focus on color and shape and and really kind of communicate the otherworldly sense of the landscape that we're standing in. So that's it for this video. It really has been a lot of fun to be back here in Utah again after 2 years. It really is just one of the most incredible landscapes on the planet and it's just a pleasure to be here. It really is so photogenic. So, I hope the video has been interesting. I hope it's been useful. If it has, please like and subscribe because it really does help the channel. And if you enjoy my photography and you'd like to join me here in Utah, [music] we'll be back here in 2027 for a couple of workshops. We've got other workshops in Alaska. We're also going to be going to Namibia, to the Draensburg in South Africa, to Meda, to Nepal. I've got workshops in some incredible places all over the world. You can find full information on all those trips on my website. So, check that out. And as ever, thanks so much for watching and good luck with all your photography. And I'll see you next time. [music] Take care.