To the desert!
I don’t know why, but there is something about visiting the desert that I just love. I suppose it could be because I didn’t really get to spend much time in a desert until later in life, so to me it still feels a bit exotic, but whatever it is, I really enjoy it. The starkness of it all, I just find really exciting to photograph.
Well, if you’ve seen my 5 Favorite Photos from 2019, you’ve seen this image already, but now you get the story! This past fall I was in Las Vegas for work, and I’d been wanting to visit the Valley of Fire State Park, which is relatively close to Las Vegas, for some time, so I finally just went out there. One of my coworkers and I drove out after work one afternoon and really just had a few hours to explore, but man, what a park! The park has gotten popular over the years because of a road that cuts through a bunch of rocks in the park (the cool kids on Instagram like to have their pictures taken in the middle of the road), but the park has SO much more to offer than just that road; and we just barely scratched the surface. On this particular afternoon, we got to a trail head close to when the sun was setting, so we just wandered back to see what we could see. The trail stayed between rocks for a good way until I finally spotted a way to get up above it all. Once on top, I was greeted by this fin that you see above (which was maybe 6 – 8 inches tall, by the way). I loved all the textures and colors, so I started snapping away. As the sunset, it turned into the perfect scene I thought, with light and shadow, and whole bunch of nothing!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson