so that happened

Sunshine on My Shoulders
Make me happy

Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water, looks so lovely.
Sunshine almost always makes me high
--Sunshine on my shoulder, John Denver, January 1, 1973

Back in Jan 1, 1973 I was having high adventure!

It has to be said, I have a thing for sunrises at Canyonlands National Park. An obsession, really, which is a slightly more noble-sounding word for a madness that compels a man of a certain age to hurl himself out of a perfectly warm bed in the dead of night. My particular patch of paradise is the Island in the Sky district, with its overlooks that have names like poetry: Bucks Canyon, Grand View, and the frankly staggering Green River Overlook.

Buck Canyon Overlook from below at Sunset.

I thought, for the sake of scientific accuracy, that I might consult my shot records to provide you with a precise tally of my pilgrimages. But upon reviewing the chaotic mess of my digital files, I realized it was a fool's errand. The number is lost to the mists of time and questionable data management. What I can offer, however, is a tour of my most spectacular failures in the pursuit of a very specific phenomenon: that sublime moment the sun crests the horizon and produces what photographers, in their delightful jargon, call "iris diagram flares."

First, one must understand the prelude to these failures. The trip to Moab is, on paper, a simple affair. The true Herculean labor happens before a wheel is turned. It's the Great 1:30 AM Extraction. This is a multi-stage operation fraught with peril, chief among them a small, furry landmine known as the cat. The sequence goes something like this: swing legs out of bed with the stealth of a cat burglar, conduct a blind shuffle to the bathroom to avoid stepping on the actual cat burglar, splash water on one's face with the enthusiasm of a man being waterboarded, fill a 32-ounce Stanley Coffee press (for this is the fuel of genius and desperation), and then, crucially, feed the cat.

This last step is a delicate negotiation. You are attempting to placate a tiny, demanding overlord while simultaneously moving many pounds of gear into a truck, all without making a sound and—this is the critical part—without letting the beast escape into the primeval darkness of a Colorado night. Failure to appease him results in a hiss, a sound of pure, condensed fury, a hiss that seems to emanate not from his lungs but from some ancient, volcanic core deep within the Earth.

Once this domestic drama is concluded, the drive itself is mostly a joy. You motor through a profound darkness punctuated only by the astonishing canopy of stars above and the looming behemoths of truck convoys thundering in the opposite direction. There's a particular stretch of Utah Route 191 that feels less like a highway and more like a channel for these land-bound freighters, but goodness, the view of the cosmos makes it all worthwhile.

Now, some failures are simple, elegant things. You drive for two and a half hours, set up hundreds of dollars worth of equipment, and the sky gods decide to hang a thick, gray curtain of cloud directly over the LaSal Mountains. No sun, no spires, no shot. You just pack up, drink your coffee, and try not to think about your warm bed. That has happened more times than I care to admit.

But the truly memorable failures, the ones that stick with you, are born of pure, unadulterated human error.

My first exhibit is a tale of distraction. It was, I must say, a perfect morning. The clouds were broken just so, like something arranged by a celestial set decorator. The sun was rising into a clean gap. My magnificent Nikon D810 was on its tripod, a structure so firmly planted and weighted it could have served as a mooring for a battleship. The mirror was locked up. My finger hovered, trembling with anticipation, over the shutter release. I was ready for "the moment"—that exquisite instant when the sun is a half-crown of fire, its light bent by the atmosphere into a full, spiky orb even before it has fully cleared the horizon.

And then, just as the sun popped, Canyonlands did what it does. A wave of impossible, golden light struck the cliffs to my left. It didn't just illuminate them; it seemed to pour down their faces like liquid honey, chasing the shadows away across the canyon floor. My head, of its own volition, turned. I was mesmerized. I watched this grand spectacle, this silent symphony of light, completely forgetting that I was there with a very specific, and very fleeting, job to do. By the time my brain reconnected with my trigger finger, the sun was fully up, sitting there in the sky with a distinct gap of blue beneath it. I had missed it. I got some perfectly lovely shots of sun-painted cliffs, but the grand prize had slipped through my fingers while I was, quite literally, sightseeing.

Bucks Canyon, looking South at sunset

Another time, it was the cold that did me in. It was a late February, a time of year when the Utah desert can't quite decide if it's winter or spring. I was at the pipe railings of Bucks Canyon Overlook, gloved but for my fingertips, waiting for the rise. The moment was approaching when, from the depths of the canyon below, a wind came up. This was not a breeze. This was a physical presence, a refrigerated ghost that had been lurking in the icy shadows all night, and it came screaming up the canyon wall driven by the thermal dynamics of the approaching dawn.

Unedited image of the Moment, Bucks Canyon

It was carrying fine, chilled sand that immediately filled my eyes. My exposed fingers went from cold to numb to feeling like alien appendages made of glass. The moisture on the back of my camera flash-froze into a brilliant white shell. My body’s only response was to burrow my head into my hood like a tortoise and begin an involuntary, rather frantic jig to generate some semblance of heat. I missed the shot because I was, in essence, flash-frozen at the necessary moment.

Which brings me to the phrase "necessary moment." I've always loved it. It puts me in mind of that scene in the film Little Big Man where Faye Dunaway, playing the preacher's wife Mrs Louise Pendrake, is about to bathe a young Dustin Hoffman as Jack and declares, "I will avert my eyes at the necessary moment." Every sunrise has its necessary moment, and I seem to have a gift for averting my eyes, or my fingers, or my entire conscious state. But I digress. Another favorite phrase of mine. My mind, when left to its own devices, can jump about like a rabbit on hot rocks.

Sunrise at Bucks Canyon

The final failure I'll share with you actually resulted in some rather nice pictures, particularly a panorama I’m quite proud of. But the getting of them, well. I was at Grand View, the very end of the road. It was dark. I was running a bit late. I couldn’t find my main flashlight. My headlamp, it turned out, had a battery that had died a quiet, unannounced death in my camera bag, and in my fumbling to replace it, I dropped the fresh one into the dark, seat-rail-infested netherworld of my truck.

My emergency backup? A couple of green chemical glow sticks. So there I am, picking my way over the tourist-tromped ground toward the edge of a 1,700-foot drop, holding a tripod in one hand and waving two eerie green sticks in the other, like a very lost and poorly equipped raver. I found a rock—or perhaps the fossilized toe of a particularly clumsy stegosaurus, it was impossible to tell—and went down. Hard. To the left. Onto the tripod.

Now, I’d always had a general, theoretical knowledge of the location of my ribcage. In that instant, however, I was granted a sudden, shockingly precise, and altogether unwelcome anatomical lesson. I knew exactly where those ribs were. I carried on, breathing shallowly, and got the shots. Months later, my good Dr. Lisa, concurred with my on-the-spot diagnosis that while I had certainly dislodged them from their gristly moorings, I probably hadn't broken them again. A small comfort, I suppose, and a fine reminder that there's not much they can do for ribs anyway, except tell you not to fall on your tripod in the dark.

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

and put up a parking lot

 

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

    --Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell, April, 1970

I woke with the kind of jolt usually reserved for finding a scorpion in your hiking boot, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped woodpecker. The moonlight slanting through the window of my lodge room—a room where the word "vintage" was doing some very heavy lifting, suggesting a deliberate design choice rather than forty years of benign neglect—cast long, unsettling shadows. It was just a dream, I told myself, clutching a blanket with the threadbare integrity of a fossilized leaf. But the terror felt as real and as solid as a fresh exposure of Precambrian basement rock.

The Grand Tetons being Grand

It had all started so hopefully. There I was, in my dream, standing in Grand Teton National Park with a camera slung over my shoulder, full of the kind of naive optimism that only a man who has forgotten all his previous trips can muster. The air was crisp. The aspens were just beginning to consider their autumn wardrobe. "Ah," I thought with profound satisfaction, "early September! The perfect window. The great summer hordes will have retreated, the throngs thinned to a manageable trickle! I shall capture the majesty unmolested!"

This, it turned out, was a geological timing miscalculation of the highest order. The throngs, I should know by now, operate on the same principle as a gas in a container: they simply expand to fill any available volume.

In the dream, however, it was worse. Far, far worse.

I was driving the Teton Park Road, eager for a sunrise that I felt, on a spiritual level, I was owed. But the road wasn't a road. It was a grid. A vast, perfectly perpendicular, crystalline lattice of asphalt stretching to the horizon, each three-by-five-meter square of which contained exactly one vehicle. It was a giant, geological game of Tetris where all the blocks had already fallen, perfectly, into place, leaving no gaps. Navigating the feeder lanes to the main parking areas was a slow-motion nightmare of brake lights and the sudden, startling pop of a van door opening into your path. The sun was coming up, you could see the first blush of red on the peaks, but only in the narrow gaps over the roofs of the slowly churning sea of SUVs beside you.

I tried for Schwabacher Landing, a place of normally reliable beauty. The turnoff was barricaded by a solid wall of Priuses, their catalytic converters humming a low, discordant drone that seemed to vibrate through the very bedrock. Before I could even contemplate a 17-point turn, a park ranger materialized at my window. He was a man who looked less born and more eroded into shape, with a face of weathered granite and a uniform that appeared to be made of tightly woven lichen.

"Permit, sir?" he boomed, his voice echoing with the gravelly authority of a minor rockfall.

"A permit for what?" I stammered, the cold dread beginning its familiar creep up my spine.

"Permit for existence," he replied, with no trace of irony. He gestured with a gnarled hand at the endless grid. "Every molecule of space, every photon of light, has been allocated for the current fiscal epoch. Your vehicle," he eyed my 4Runner with the sort of deep, geological contempt a block of gneiss might hold for a piece of flimsy shale, "is outside its designated temporal-spatial coordinates."

He pointed to a small LED screen embedded in the lichen of his chest. It displayed a single, pulsing message: "PARKING LOT FULL. ESTIMATED WAIT: 4.6 MILLION YEARS."

Then things went from merely bureaucratic to properly, geologically unsettling. The mountains themselves began to change. The Grand Teton, that magnificent, ice-carved horn, started to morph. Its pristine slopes became riddled with the yawning mouths of multi-story parking garages, carved directly into the granite. The iconic peak was crowned not with snow, but with a towering, illuminated sign that blinked, "GRAND TETON PARKING STRUCTURE C: LEVELS 1-37 FULL."

Down below, Jenny Lake was no longer water. It was a vast, shimmering mirror of car roofs, reflecting the dawn in a fractured kaleidoscope of metallic blues, reds, and silvers. And from this great, silent expanse of parked humanity rose a faint, disembodied chant: “The Pit Toilets are full… the Pit Toilets are full…” It took a horrifying moment for my dream-addled brain to process the true meaning: they weren't complaining about the lines. They were providing a real-time, and frankly unwelcome, hydrology report.

I felt myself sinking into the pavement, the sheer gravitational mass of it all pressing down on me. My camera felt like a useless brick. What good is a lens when the entire landscape is an impenetrable barricade of traffic, and the hiking paths are awash in things you’d rather not think about flowing across the feet of people waiting in line for that unflushable seat?

And that's when I bolted upright, gasping in the musty, "vintage" air of the lodge. The real Grand Tetons still stood outside, majestic and, mercifully, free of integrated parking solutions. The only sound was the low, persistent hum from the wall of EV chargers out in the lot—a gentle, real-world reminder that our quest for a clean escape is always, inevitably, tethered to a plug.

I glanced at my camera, then at the perfectly acceptable, uncluttered view from my own deck. Perhaps, I thought, a simple shot of the dawn from right here wouldn't be so bad. The mountains, after all, aren't going anywhere. And neither, it seems, are the crowds. You spend your life appreciating the unimaginable power of tectonic uplift, only to realize that, in the 21st century, all that majestic upheaval has really done is create a more scenic and geologically interesting place to have a parking crisis. The only answer, I suspect, is a snowmobile in the dead of winter. The photography, one imagines, would be spectacular.

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

'

Some Techno Babble

Destination outward bound
I turn to see the northern lights behind the wing
Horizons seem to beckon me
Learned how to cry too young, so now I live to sing

           -- Renaissance, 1973

Alright, gather 'round, you budding shutterbugs and digital darkroom dabblers, for a tale of photographic woe, technological triumph, and the rather peculiar habits of yours truly, as recounted after a serendipitous encounter within the hallowed (and often baffling) halls of our local medical establishment. You see, I was surfing it’s bureaucracy, while taking those tests we all experience with our yearly physical, likely contemplating the existential dread of yet another form to sign, when I stumbled upon a kindred spirit – a new acquaintance, no less! – who, in a moment of disarming honesty, confessed to owning a Canon camera she'd never quite managed to operate. My heart, a delicate instrument tuned to the subtle clicks and whirs of a well-loved lens, sank a little. The tragedy! A perfectly good piece of photographic machinery gathering dust, its creative potential untapped, its silicon soul yearning for light. Naturally, I seized the opportunity to champion my own humble corner of the internet, this very narrative space, and my photographic website. Because, let's be honest, what's a chance encounter if not an opportunity for a little unashamed self-promotion?

And so, dear reader, I present to you this 'exciting episode,' a modest attempt to illuminate the shadowy corners of photographic curiosity and perhaps, just perhaps, coax that neglected Canon out of its slumber.

My Nikon Z8 with it's silicon wrapper. I like being able to find my camera in the dark.

Of Cameras and the Curious Case of Brand Loyalty

Now, when it comes to the tools of the trade, I'm a Nikon man. Always have been, always will be. It's like choosing a good woman; once you're in, you're in for life, or at least you should be, come what may. Although I confess, my journey through the digital landscape began with a couple of Sony point-and-shoot cameras. I won't launch into a full-scale Sony-bashing tirade – life's too short, and there are far more pressing matters, like the proper exposure settings for a particularly stubborn sunset – but let's just say my satisfaction was fleeting, and crucial components seemed to develop an inexplicable aversion to functioning after a mere handful of months.

Then there was Canon. Ah, Canon. The name itself conjures images of mighty artillery, not delicate light-capturing devices. My mind goes there because I was a Navy Gunner’s Mate in one of my past lives. And for good reason, I might add. I once, in a moment of paternal zeal upon the arrival of my son, splurged on an expensive Canon video camera. A mere year and a half later, in a symphony of fizzling and leaking capacitors, it gave up the ghost. I waged a valiant campaign, talking my way to the very secretary of the US division's head honcho, but alas, the bureaucratic fortress held firm. Suffice it to say, I wouldn't even buy a Canon bath towel now. And while I'm sure it's an entirely different company these days, the sentiment remains: cannons are for shooting at ships, not for taking charming pictures of them.

My loyalty, as I've mentioned, lies firmly with Nikon. My second film camera, a robust Nikon FG, set the precedent, and I've been a devotee ever since. I still possess my Nikon F4, a magnificent beast I acquired used, and which continues to operate with the stoic reliability of a Swiss watch, albeit one that weighs about the same as a small boulder. It's a Sherman Tank, pure and simple. Its analog controls are a tactile delight, a reassuring presence that whispers, "Fear not, for I am here, and I shall perform my functions without fail." Then there's the F5, another dependable workhorse, ready to tackle whatever photographic challenge I throw its way. I will load black and white TriX film in the F4, Fujifilm in the F5 and venture off into the Golden Hour delights.

The Enduring Charm of Good Glass

In this dizzying age of technological obsolescence, cameras are commodities. You buy one today, and tomorrow there's a shinier, faster, more pixel-packed model designed to make you feel utterly inadequate. Lenses, however, are a different breed entirely. They are, to borrow a phrase, a resource. Good glass is, quite simply, good glass, and it lasts. Nikon, until the advent of their mirrorless Z cameras, maintained a glorious compatibility with their entire lens ecosystem. This means I can, and often do, attach a Nikon lens crafted in the 1970s to any of my modern cameras.

For the discerning photographer, this is a revelation. Imagine, a treasure hunt on eBay, where one can unearth vintage Nikon lenses – often referred to as 'classic glass' – for mere dollars on the thousand, a fraction of their original cost. A little research, a sprinkle of patience, and you can assemble a truly excellent film kit. While these older lenses might be a tad heavier and lack the advanced Vibration Reduction technology of their contemporary counterparts, the ultimate goal is, after all, to produce high-quality images, not a dizzying array of bells and whistles. Nikon has also provided an excellent Nikon F to Z converter, which allows all the great Nikkor glass to be used on the Z technology. You won’t be doing that with a Canon or Sony. They want to buy their latest shiny new toy.

The Allure of Film: A Masterclass in Light

And now, a quick but crucial detour. If you genuinely aspire to learn photography, to truly understand the dance of light and shadow, then procure a film camera. It's a baptism by fire, a masterclass in manipulation. And if you venture into the monochromatic world of black and white film, it can be incredibly economical, especially if you embrace the alchemical art of developing your own negatives. Working with black and white forces you to see light and form and color in a fundamentally different way, revealing the very essence of composition. And when I speak of "color" in this context, you'll understand it more profoundly once you've grappled with the nuances of film technology in monochrome. It's like learning to cook from scratch before relying on pre-made meals – you appreciate the ingredients and the process so much more.

Canyonlands National Park, Green River Overlook. This time in monochrome. Nikon D810 color conversion.

Navigating the Digital Wild West: Software for the Soul

Of course, in this brave new world, photography isn't just about the click of the shutter; it's also about the digital darkroom. Editing software is no longer an optional extra but a fundamental necessity. And here, I believe, Artificial Intelligence is poised to democratize the process, lowering the formidable barrier to entry that has traditionally guarded the gates of digital manipulation.

I've been wrestling with Photoshop since the 80s – a testament to its enduring power, and perhaps my own stubbornness. While I can now zip through edits with the dexterity of a seasoned surgeon, its learning curve is, to put it mildly, practically vertical. I still use Photoshop and Lightroom, but I'm increasingly impressed by the speed and impact of tools like Topaz or Luminar for quick, yet stunning, results.

Given my background in software engineering, grappling with digital editing tools is, for me, a relatively straightforward affair. But I've worked with countless individuals who simply don't possess a "head for complex technologies." And I get it. This stuff is complex, and often, maddeningly, it just doesn't work as advertised. But that, as they say, is a subject for another time. The good news is that tools like Luminar Neo offer a surprisingly accessible and intuitive interface. And thankfully, the digital ether is teeming with helpful guides. Jim Nix, for instance, is a fine explainer, and his videos on YouTube is an excellent starting point: https://youtu.be/klNCpblyMsk?si=MQLyR3HbVD2wuNuT. Dive into my past musings, and you'll unearth a veritable treasure trove of other YouTube resources perfect for the photographic neophyte. Go forth and prosper, my friends!

The AI Advantage: NotebookLM and the Quest for Knowledge

And now for one more AI tool, a marvel of modern technology that I simply must recommend: NotebookLM (NLM) by Google. You can find it at notebooklm.google.com. You get a free month to dabble, and then, I believe, it’s currently around $20 a month, though Google is forever concocting delightful promotions to bundle their various digital delights. Why do I sing its praises? Allow me to offer a single, illustrative use case from my own photographic journey. I could, quite frankly, bore you for weeks detailing its myriad applications, but for now, a simple example will suffice.

I recently acquired a Nikon Z8, a glorious piece of kit that boasts all the capabilities of my old Nikon D810 DSLR and then some – so much more, in fact, that it could, and did, make a grown man weep with joy (or perhaps, confusion). Nikon, to their credit, generally does an admirable job of organizing their menus, but pouring over a manual, taking notes, and attempting to commit every arcane setting to memory is a time-consuming and often fruitless endeavor.

Enter NLM, my digital Genius. I've used it to construct an interactive database of Z8 wisdom. I scoured YouTube for every instructional Z8 video I could find, loaded their URLs into NLM's Resource Panel, then uploaded the official Nikon Owners Manual as a PDF. I even included a few blog URLs and web pages that detail how to master the Z8 for various photographic pursuits, such as night, studio, and landscape photography, among others. To further enrich this digital wellspring, I added videos that are not specific to the Z8 but are invaluable nonetheless, covering topics such as composition, exposure, depth of field, shutter speed, and ISO.

The result? An information powerhouse. Now, instead of fumbling through a physical manual, I can simply open the NLM ‘Chat’ Panel and pose questions like, "What menu settings do I need for an exposure stack, and what pitfalls should I avoid?" or "How far can I push the ISO" for an image taken in those elusive late-evening bluelight conditions? The possibilities are boundless. You can even ask it to guide your exploration of a subject, offering prompts and hints to help you delve deeper into your photographic conundrums.

And then there's the 'Studio' panel, a veritable wonderland where your questions can be transformed into audio, a video overview, or, currently, a mind map, reports, flashcards, and quizzes – truly excellent learning aids. I hope you're beginning to glimpse the immense potential this technology offers across a multitude of domains, from organizing your personal finances to mastering the delicate art of soufflé-making. So, yes, I wholeheartedly recommend taking a look.

The Grand Finale: Go Forth and Be a Nike!

That's quite enough for now. I shall, no doubt, revisit these fascinating subjects in due course. My primary aim here, however, is singular: to empower you to take pictures. So, grab a camera – any camera – and get out there. It will, I promise you, sharpen your gaze, helping you discern the intricate details of the world that often escape our hurried attention. Be a NIKE. (um... just Do It!)

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Things I'm not

 

America, where are you now

Don't you care about your sons and daughters

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

     – Monster, Steppenwolf, November, 1969

We all, I suspect, bumble through life with a sort of internal, unwritten rulebook tucked away in a dusty corner of our minds. Some of its tenets are hard-won, forged in the fiery crucible of some calamitous personal experience—like, for instance, learning that the precise moment a man is holding a wrench and staring grimly at a frustrated, cantankerous part of an engine is not the time to cheerfully ask if he "needs any help." Other rules are simply imposed upon us by a world that, on the whole, would prefer we not be complete fools.

Moon View Overlook, Near Hanksville, Utah.

Now, I’m not about to climb a pulpit and start thumping it about morality. Goodness knows, some morals are as situational as a waterproof poncho in the Gobi Desert. But I am talking about the little list of "Things I Will Do" and "Things I Absolutely Won't" that I carry around, especially when I find myself out in the backcountry—or, as I think of it, 'in the field' with my rock hammer and camera.

My primary rule is to act like a visitor, because that’s precisely what I am. I’m a guest in a very, very old house. In some places, it’s more than that. It is, and I hesitate to use the word lest I sound like I’ve been communing with crystals, a spiritual experience. But it’s not about vibrations or energy vortexes. It's about the staggering, humbling presence of deep time. I'm talking about the feeling of standing in a canyon where the walls are a library, and every distinct layer is a page turned on a day 190 million years ago. You can feel the sheer, ponderous weight of all those yesterdays. It does something to your perspective. Suddenly, that worrying email from your financial advisor seems, well, a little less apocalyptic. Some people aren't wired for that feeling, I realize, but it’s how I roll.

And since I’ve mentioned the rock hammer, let's get a crucial bit of business out of the way. There is a sacred commandment among those of us who go about tapping on the planet’s stony bits: Thou shalt not use thy hammer to wantonly deface a rock in a State or National Park. It’s simply not done. Furthermore, if you are lucky enough to stumble upon a vertebrate fossil—a bit of bone, a tooth, the outline of something that swam or scurried when the world was young—you have a profound duty. You are to leave it. That’s right, leave it be. Take a picture, get a GPS reading, write down what you see. Then you call it in. Every fossil is a story, a chapter in the Earth’s immense biography. To pocket it for a paperweight is to be the kind of villain who tears a page from a priceless book. Give a specialist a chance to read that story. It belongs to all of us.

Right, that’s as preachy as I intend to get. But it all flows into a practical code for looking at rocks without being a total ass about it.

First, and it physically pains me that this even needs to be said, carry a garbage bag. And not just for your own apple cores and sandwich wrappers. Appoint yourself a mobile, voluntary sanitation engineer. If you see some other thoughtless soul’s discarded Ho-Ho wrapper, pick it up. If you stumble upon a full-blown crime scene of dumping—a whole tableau of tires and tattered furniture—too vast for your single bag, make a note of the location and report that, too. It is a curiously and deeply satisfying endeavor to leave a place a little tidier than you found it.

Then there is the delicate matter of the other people. The tourists. And let me be clear, I say this with no malice. We are all, after all, tourists somewhere. But there’s a certain choreography to a crowded viewpoint at a national park, say, on the rim of the Colorado National Monument on a sunny Saturday, that is a spectacle all its own.

You have the great, silent, profound abyss of geological time stretching out before you, and then you have the frantic, bustling, utterly human chaos pressed up against the guardrail. It's a ballet of selfie sticks, of parents trying to corral children who are dangerously fascinated by a chipmunk, and of people holding up iPads to take photos, which has always struck me as being like trying to film a wedding with a serving tray.

Now, I am often burdened with a tripod, a device which, when its legs are fully splayed, has the spatial footprint of a small lunar lander and an almost magnetic ability to attract unwary shins. To plonk this contraption down at the prime viewing spot at high noon is an act of profound territorial aggression. You might as well bring a deckchair and a cooler.

And you look at them—a family from, let's say, Ohio, who have saved up all year, driven for two days in a minivan filled with snack wrappers and simmering sibling rivalries, all for this one sublime moment of looking into the abyss. This might be it for them. Their one and only glimpse into this particular majesty. Who am I, in all good conscience, to be the lanky fellow with the complicated camera gear who photobombs their one precious holiday memory? You cannot, you simply must not, be the reason their photo album has a permanent, three-legged aluminum asterisk in the middle of the view.

So, I’ve learned to engage in a bit of strategic avoidance. It’s not just polite; it’s frankly a better experience. You let the great midday rush have its frantic, happy hour. Let them have their joy unimpeded. I find a quieter corner, or more often, I simply come back when the crowds have thinned. The best light, after all, is at the fringes of the day anyway, when the air is cooler, the shadows are long, and the only sound is the wind and the faint, satisfied sigh of the Earth settling in for the night. You get a better picture, and you don’t have to apologize to a stranger for tripping them. It is, in every way, a victory.

Then we have the matter of cairns. Please, for the love of all that is geologically stable, don’t build little towers of rocks. I know they seem harmless, a sort of rustic "Kilroy was here." But under every one of those rocks is a micro-environment, a tiny, bustling metropolis of lichens, microbes, and insects going about their important business. When you move that rock, you are, with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, obliterating an entire city block. I’ve seen places where this foolishness starts with one tidy stack, and a year later it's spread like a rash, a veritable Stonehenge of bad ideas, each one a little monument to the human need to prove "I was here, and I was briefly bored."

This sensitivity extends to the very ground you walk on. Much of the desert is covered in something called biological soil crust, it’s the desert biome. It looks like dirt. It feels like dirt. But it is, in fact, a magnificent, living skin—a fragile condominium of bacteria, fungi, and lichen that holds the whole place together. Stomp across it and you leave a wound that can take a century—a hundred years—to properly heal. So I pay attention. If my goal is a particularly fetching fossil dune over yonder, I’ll pick my path with care, sticking to hard rock or the gravelly bottom of a flash arroyo—nature’s designated highways.

My courtesies even extend to the domestic beasts. If I drive past a herd of what I gently termed 'meat cows', I slow to a crawl and turn the music down. They don’t need my dust and racket. Frankly, they look miserable enough, trying to conjure a meal from a landscape that’s mostly brown. And though I don’t eat the stuff, I do wonder if a life of stress and grit affects the taste. I suspect it hardly matters by the time it's been processed into something that looks cheerfully red in the grocery cooler. And don’t even get me started on frozen burger patties. There’s a dark, industrial alchemy in that process that my frozen blueberries, bless their little antioxidant hearts, have never had to witness.

Wild things, of course, get an even wider berth. A pronghorn, or any of the herding ungulates out here, operates with a personal space bubble of about half a mile. They are creatures wound tight, perpetually ready to explode into a dead sprint. The last thing I want to be is the lumbering reason their cortisol levels spike. I want them to remain relaxed, to continue their important business of chewing and looking nervously at the horizon. And as for bears... well, I find I don’t need a rule for bears. They have their own, and they are notoriously strict about enforcement. The onus, as they say, is entirely on you to not be a furry, 600-pound enforcer’s problem.

And then there are the coyotes. They are the ghosts of the landscape, and you must assume they are always there, watching. This is why I rarely build fires. A fire is a lovely thing, but it’s a wall of light that blinds you to the world beyond its flicker. You miss the whole show. A coyote will sit just past the edge of your light, a silent observer. Peer out into the blackness, and if you’re lucky, you’ll catch the glint of their eyes, a pair of tiny, floating embers reflecting your intrusion. At night, they’ll entertain you, yipping and howling stories to one another across the vast, dark stage. It’s the best theater in the world.

Campground etiquette is a whole other chapter. I often keep strange hours for photography, so if I arrive late, I’ll pick a campe site near the entrance, or park near the entrance and quietly walk my gear in. When it’s truly quiet, the sound of a tent zipper can be as startlingly loud as a bugle call. As for the rolling apartment blocks that pass for RVs these days, with their generators humming through the night with all the gentle ambiance of a light industrial park... well, that is a sermon I shall save for another time, perhaps when my mood is fouler and my pen is sharper.

Colorado National Monument

This brings me to technology and communication. I carry radios—CB, GMRS, UHF/VHF HAM. Your mobile phone out here is a fickle friend. It will either have no signal, or its battery will die at the precise moment you need it most. And while satellite communicators are all the rage, I have a deep-seated reluctance to have my lifeline depend on the whims of a billionaire’s orbital hobby. There’s an excellent concept called the Wilderness Protocol for radios, a sort of safety net of strangers listening for strangers. It’s a fine, old-fashioned thought.
And now, a confession. After all this talk of treading lightly, I will tell on myself. Every so often, when I am absolutely certain I am twenty miles from nowhere and haven’t seen another soul for hours, I will do a silly thing as the sun goes down and the stars come up. I’ll fire up an amplifier and speakers and subject the local geology to classic rock and roll. Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" echoing off sandstone walls that were laid down 200 million years ago is a glorious, surreal, and deeply satisfying experience. I like to think the coyotes sing along. It’s probably a fault of mine, but it helps keep me feeling both wild and, in a strange way, perfectly settled.

It occurs to me sometimes, usually when I'm in the middle of some absurdly specific personal task—arranging the toast on a plate in a particular way, for instance, or patting all my pockets in the correct sequence before leaving the house (wallet, keys, phone, nameless dread)—that we are all just hopeless slaves to ritual. And the truly baffling thing, the thing that stops you in your tracks if you give it more than a moment's thought, is that we humans have been doing this forever.

Honestly, we have. You can't seem to dig a hole anywhere on this planet without finding evidence of our ancient ancestors doing something profoundly and predictably odd. You find a 40,000-year-old skeleton, and it’s not just a pile of bones; it’s been carefully arranged, sprinkled with red ochre, and buried with a selection of perfectly good tools that you have to think the rest of the tribe could have desperately used. Why? Ritual.

It's all faintly bonkers, if you stop and think about it. Imagine Ug the Caveman and his brother Ga. Ug has just spent three days meticulously chipping a beautiful flint axe head. It's a masterpiece. But does he use it to fend off a sabre-toothed cat? No. He trudges ten miles to a special cave to bury their recently departed Uncle Grog with it, because that’s just what you do. Ga probably stood there, swatting flies, thinking, "You know, Grog is beyond the point of needing a sharp axe, but that bear that keeps sniffing around the camp decidedly is not." But he doesn't say anything, because it's the ritual.

And it has never, ever stopped. You go from sprinkling bones with pigment to building Stonehenge—a project of such back-breaking, multi-generational effort that it makes putting together an IKEA shelf look like a lazy Sunday afternoon, all apparently to find out when the days are about to get longer, something a reasonably observant badger could have told them for free. You get the Romans, a people of otherwise formidable practicality, who wouldn't dream of starting a war without first checking which way a chicken pecked at its corn. Think of it. The fate of an empire resting on the lunchtime whims of a hen.

We look back and chuckle at all this, of course, feeling terribly modern and sensible, right before we knock on a wooden table or refuse to walk under a ladder. A baseball player will step up to the plate and perform a series of tics, taps, and tugs so complex it looks less like a prelude to sport and more like a man trying to disarm a bomb only he can see. We have our lucky shirts, our special coffee mugs, the side of the bed we must sleep on.

Fundamentally, I don't think the urge has changed one bit. We are pattern-seeking creatures adrift in a universe of magnificent, terrifying chaos, and the little rituals are our way of trying to impose a sliver of order on it all. We are drawing a bison on the cave wall, tapping the bat on the plate, and sprinkling the ochre on the bones, all in the desperate, hopeful belief that if we just do the little things right, the big things might not eat us. It almost never works, of course, but the amazing thing is, we just keep on doing it. It’s the longest, strangest, and most deeply human tradition we have.

So, I suppose it’s all quite simple: Pay attention. Be aware. Give everything some space. And understand, fundamentally, that you are an interloper. It’s not your house. You’re just a visitor, lucky enough to be passing through.

Thanks for stopping by for a read!

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserve

Critters

 

The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz
And the sky with no clouds
The heat was hot, and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound

I've been through the desert
On a horse with no name...

                --Horse With No Name, America

It has always struck me as a peculiar feature of the American West that you can leave a perfectly respectable city—in my case, a bustling metropolis of some seventy thousand souls on the Colorado side of things—and within the time it takes to listen to two-thirds of a classic rock album, find yourself in a place where the human population has plummeted to something like ten people per square mile. That feels, to an Easterner’s sensibilities, like splendid isolation. But you push on. You cross into Utah, and the numbers perform a truly astonishing vanishing act. Suddenly you’re in a landscape administered by the Bureau of Land Management, where the population figure is not ten, or even one, but a statistically comical 0.01 people per square mile. That’s not a population; it’s a rounding error. You could shout a reasonably clever limerick and the sound waves would dissipate into the heat-shimmered void having never troubled a single human eardrum.

Even Moab, the region’s hub of fleece-vested, mountain-biking humanity, only manages a density of about 2.6 people per square mile, a figure that feels practically Parisian after the drive in. This, you see, leaves an awful lot of country for the non-human residents. And it is full, absolutely chock-a-block, with critters.

Now, one must be specific here. The dominant life form, the great overlord of this semi-arid kingdom, is the cow. Not the bison, that noble, shaggy emblem of the West, but Bos taurus, the common meat cow. They are everywhere, standing around with the vacant, slightly bewildered expression of a tourist who has lost his map. They are, to put it mildly, an invasive species of ambulatory steaks, and every other poor ungulate in the vicinity is locked in a desperate competition with them for the few blades of grass that have the audacity to turn green in a land that measures its rainfall in wistful sighs.

But if you look past the bovine hegemony, the real West begins to reveal itself. You see hawks, magnificent and aloof, carving circles in a sky so blue it hurts the eyes. You see the flash of a coyote, all lean muscle and intelligent cunning, trotting along a ridgeline as if it owns the place, which, in a spiritual sense, it absolutely does. I have a particular soft spot for the coyote. If you find yourself in the right canyon, just as the evening light turns the sandstone to liquid gold, you can hear them. It’s not a howl, not really. It’s a conversation—a series of yips, barks, and wails that feels ancient and deeply important, as if they’re settling the affairs of the universe. To overhear it is a privilege.

There are pronghorn, looking perpetually startled, nibbling at the leftovers from the cows’ banquet. And underfoot, a whole Lilliputian world unfolds: lizards doing push-ups on sun-baked rocks, scorpions tucked away like malevolent little secrets, and the ghosts of creatures far grander. Just a few feet beneath your boots lie the fossilized bones of dinosaurs, the undiscovered remains of a world so alien and monstrous it beggars belief. I sometimes like to think that something of them lingers—not just their bones, but a certain weight in the air, a sense of deep, deep time that makes your own concerns feel rather small.

Of course, nature is not all majestic eagles and philosophical coyotes. It also contains things that want to drink your blood. My personal nemesis is a creature known to science as Ceratopogonidae, but known to me as a tiny, flying spawn of Satan. These are the no-see-ums, midges that, for their size, possess a ferocity that would make a wolverine blush. They have a particular fondness for my ears. Despite my best efforts with repellents that could likely dissolve plastic, one will invariably get through. The result is a throbbing, cherry-red earlobe that takes the better part of a week to return to its normal, unremarkable state. I’ve learned that a dab of anti-histamine cream helps, but it’s a losing battle. My blood type is O+, which I’m told is a universal donor. Apparently, this also makes me a universal delicacy for the entire biting insect kingdom.

But then there are the moments of connection. The ravens in Rabbit Valley got to know my truck. I’d put out an aluminum pie pan with some water and shelled peanuts, and within minutes, these magnificent, glossy black birds would drop from the sky, their calls like a deep, throaty chuckle. They are impossibly smart, and to be recognized by one feels like being accepted into a very exclusive club.

I’ve learned a healthy respect for the snakes, too. We have our rattlers, of course. My view is that if you get bitten by a rattlesnake, the fault is, more often than not, yours. The snake wants absolutely nothing to do with you. It is not lying in wait, plotting your demise. It is, most likely, having a pleasant snooze in the sun. If you go crashing through the brush without looking where you’re putting your feet, you can’t be terribly surprised when you frighten the living daylights out of it. A walking staff bounced on a rock is a wonderful announcer of one’s presence. It simply says, "Pardon me, I’m just passing through," giving her ample time to wake up and glide silently away.

I’ve recently acquired a monstrously large 100−400 mm zoom lens, a piece of equipment that looks like it ought to be mounted on a battleship. My plan is to keep it on the passenger seat, ready for those fleeting moments. My head is usually buried in a geological outcrop, trying to comprehend the unfathomable story told by layers of sandstone and shale, but I’m hoping to pay more attention to the living narrative around me. I’m not a stalker; I have no desire to stress these animals. I just want to capture a moment of their lives without disturbing the scene.

It’s that life, in all its fragility, that stays with you. A few weeks ago, during what has been a punishingly hot and dry summer, I saw something that lodged itself in my heart. Along the side of the highway, a coyote was tugging at the desiccated hide of a road-killed cow that had been lying there since spring. There was almost nothing left of the carcass—just a cage of sun-bleached ribs and a stiff, black sheet of leather. The coyote, lean and visibly stressed by the drought, was working tirelessly in the late afternoon heat, with cars whizzing past just yards away.

There was no majesty in it. It wasn't the noble predator of a nature documentary. It was just a hungry animal, doing what it had to do to survive, pulling apart the sad, leathery remains of a dead thing. It was grim, and desperate, and profoundly sad. And yet, it was also just… life. Hard, unrelenting, and stubbornly, beautifully persistent, out here in the great, empty, everything.

 buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Heart of the sunrise

 

Love comes to you and then after
Dream on, on to the heart of the sunrise
You’re lost on a wave that you're dreaming
Dream on, on to the heart of the sunrise

                  -- Heart of the Sunrise, Yes

Good morning.


There is a particular and peculiar madness that grips a landscape photographer, and it begins, as so many questionable life choices do, with a bowel schedule. My preparations for a sunrise shoot in Canyonlands National Park don’t start with charging batteries or cleaning lenses, but with a strategic dietary shutdown two full days in advance. By the evening before the day before the main event, I am eating no more.


Now, this may seem a trifle extreme, but I invite you to consider the alternative. There is a specific type of existential dread that can only be induced by one’s intestines staging a mutiny at the precise moment the pre-dawn sky begins to blush with colour. The only recourse is a hasty, clench-legged dash to a National Park pit toilet, a structure that, more often than not, has recently weathered the collective digestive turmoil of several tour buses full of people who apparently subsist on a diet of chili dogs and regret. It is an experience that can strip the soul of its poetry, and so, I fast.

The alarm, when it shrieks, does so at 1:00 a.m. One in the morning. An hour so profoundly unnatural that even the mice are still asleep. There follows a silent, zombie-like ritual: coffee, the loading of an alarming amount of gear into the truck, and then onto I-70 to head west into the immense, inky blackness of the high desert. From my front door to the moment the camera clicks onto the tripod is a journey of two hours, and I am a stickler for being there a full hour and a half before the sun even considers making an appearance. You have to be there to watch the world wake up.

I am, of course, entirely at the mercy of the atmosphere. I’ll spend days watching weather models, trying to triangulate a morning that promises a nice scattering of clouds for dramatic effect, but not a solid duvet of grey that smothers the whole affair. But you can plan all you want; sometimes the sky simply doesn’t get the memo. And then there's the eternal nemesis: that stubborn, low-slung bank of clouds that invariably parks itself directly over the La Sal Mountains, hiding the sun until it’s so high that the soft, magical light is gone and the canyons are just fully, bluntly lit.

My relationship with my equipment has become, I'll admit, slightly complicated. I recently acquired my second-ever digital camera, a gleaming modern marvel with a set of zooms that covers a frankly preposterous range, from a wide 14 mm out to 400 mm. My last new camera was purchased back in 2015, an old friend I know so intimately I could operate it in a coma. It still comes with me, naturally. I’ll set it up on a second tripod, methodically clicking away on an interval timer, capturing a time-lapse while I fuss with the new gadget. The new camera’s neatest trick is an adaptor that lets it talk to my menagerie of legacy prime lenses, beautiful old pieces of glass I’ve accumulated over the years.

There used to be a rather tedious and long-running debate in photography circles about primes versus zooms, but it’s mostly vanished now. If you have the money, a good zoom is a spectacular thing. And yet, given the choice between one of those and a jewel-like prime lens on an adaptor, I’ll shoot the prime. There’s just something about it.

Now, Canyonlands' Island in the Sky district is littered with majestic viewpoints, and I have my favorites. There is one, however, that I almost religiously avoid for sunrise: the Mesa Arch overlook. I’ve been there in the late morning and afternoon, and it’s lovely. But in the pre-dawn hours, the parking lot tells a different story. It’s a staging ground, filled with adventure vans and rental cars, engines rumbling, a nervous energy hanging in the air. I went in once, just to see, and was confronted with a solid wall of tripods, a bristling phalanx of carbon fiber and aluminum, each with a shooter hunched over it in grim determination. I snapped one picture of the crowd itself and left.

I’ve heard tales of actual fisticuffs breaking out over prime spots. And I suppose I get it. If you’ve flown across the country for your one week of vacation, and you have exactly one chance to bag that iconic shot of the sun glowing through the arch—an image a quick Google search will provide you in overwhelming abundance—you’re going to jostle for position. But the whole scene is a complete antithesis to my purpose. My sunrise journeys are, for me, bordering on mystic experiences. The Mesa Arch scrum, with its barely suppressed tripod-rage, simply doesn’t pass my needs test. In the back of my mind, I keep telling myself I’ll sneak over on some bleak Tuesday in January or February, chancing upon an empty lot. I’ve been out here ten years and that day has yet to arrive.

After the sun is properly up and the light is getting harsh, I pack up and invariably head over to the Green River Overlook. It never disappoints. The morning cloud activity over that staggering immensity of carved earth is almost always good for something. I always find an excuse to stop here; the view is one of those you’ll be thinking about during your last moments on earth, if you’re lucky enough to have the time.

By the time I’m finished, cameras packed and stowed, it’s usually around 10:30 a.m. If time permits, the next stop is breakfast in Moab. I’ve sampled them all, and you can get a good breakfast anywhere in town, but my heart belongs to the Moab Diner. At that hour, even during high season, I can usually get a table. They’re busy, but they have a knack for finding you a seat. I can only speak to their eggs over easy with wheat toast and a side of oatmeal, with coffee. It’s always good, it arrives with startling speed, and my coffee cup is never allowed to see its own bottom. If it’s not too busy—and I am a considerate fellow who watches for a line at the door—I’ll linger, drinking frankly inadvisable amounts of coffee and scribbling notes about what I saw, what worked, and what edits I might try. I tip well, always more than half the cost of the meal, the right thing to do for breakfast service.

Again, when time is a luxury, the trip back is not via the interstate. I take Route 128, which winds through the magnificent Colorado River canyon, past the town of Castle Valley, toward the semi-ghost town of Cisco. If you haven’t driven this road, you simply must. A word of warning: you may find yourself behind a convoy of those tricked-out Jeeps, the ones with tires taller than a St. Bernard, all jostling each other like puppies on a road that is decidedly not a playground. It’s a Moab thing.

The alternative is Route 191, straight out of Moab back to I-70. It’s faster, but you’ll be sharing the road with an endless procession of long-haul trucks. They are 'moving', and much of the road is just two lanes. There is absolutely nothing ignoble about spotting one of those behemoths in your rearview mirror and diving into the nearest pull-off spot to let it rumble past.

Unless I’m staying over, I head straight home. In my mind, the journey is 80 miles at 80 miles per hour, but it’s actually longer. The speed limit drops to 75 as you cross into Colorado, just west of Rabbit Valley. Then it’s the reverse of the morning’s ritual: unload the gear, take a very long shower, and then surrender to a nap. The day ends in front of the computer, unloading the memory cards and reviewing the day’s haul. While it’s all fresh, I’ll make editing notes and, most importantly, begin planning the next trip. Are there gear refinements to be made? A different spot to try? They call this "lessons learned" my other world of project management. For me, it’s about the incremental perfecting of a skill, and of finding that one image that captures the emotional weight of a cold, lonely, and utterly perfect morning in the desert.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park

 buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved