I mentioned last week that my buddy Zach had driven out to Utah to meet me, and because he has a 4×4 truck, we were able to get out to some places that neither one of us had ever been.  This week’s pictures are from such a place – and in fact, that is true of all the pictures in this Utah series!  Though technically you *could* walk out to this needle, it would be quite the haul.

Actually that’s a funny story.  Do you guys remember that scene from The Office where Michael has this new GPS unit and it tells him to turn… and so he ends up turning into a lake?  That’s exactly how getting to this place feels.  There’s just this spot on the highway where you stop, and then just turn out into the desert and start driving… literally just driving out into nothing (the nothingness looks a lot like the picture from last week!).  There were tracks, but they seemed to go in every direction.  We knew generally what direction we should be traveling, but not much else.  It was kind of wild.  We obviously did end up finding it though, and managed to come away with some nice shots at sunrise.

Now, about the picture.  For the picture above I actually setup on the opposite side of the tower, hoping to get the sun rising behind it.  As I watched the sky, however, I decided it wasn’t going to be that great of a sunrise, so I went to the side you see above to see how the light looked.  From that vantage point, the early light of dawn was illuminating all the surrounding cliffs, leaving the needle looking especially black.  In infrared, the scene really came to life, I thought, so I went with it.

In my alternative perspective section below, you’ll find one additional picture from this same local.  That scene would be just out of the frame to the right in the picture above.  As Zach and I were walking out, the sun had come up over the cliffs and was now starting to hit the surrounding landscape.  I was really taken by how the light was playing on the sand, and again, the contrast provided by infrared really told the story I was after.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson