Post Toasties, a bowl full of moments

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss

                             --Rudyard Kipling

I sit, a time-traveler sorting through his souvenirs. I look at the numbers, the cold arithmetic, the rattling digital bones of last Friday’s harvest. An excursion, they call it. No, it was a pilgrimage to the sun, a visit to Canyonlands National Park, and I have returned with ghosts trapped in a silver box.

Now, the real work. The séance. This is post-production, you see. I am assembling the data, tapping on the walls of the code, coaxing the silent stories to speak, to tell me of the moments.

The raw numbers glitter, but they are sterile. A universe of 42.3 gigabytes, cold as interstellar space. The truth is not in the numbers; it’s between them. You must wade in, dive deep into that electric ocean, and remember. Remember the decisions, the chill on the skin, the click of the dial when your eye was pressed to the glass. What story did I really bring home from that dawn? It’s a mountain of data, a celestial avalanche. And like all good rock miners facing an ore wall, you pick away–divide and conquer.

One decision, one magic spell I cast, was to shoot 5-level exposure brackets as the sun rose.

Be patient with me here, we’re wading into the deep, humming water now.

For every instant the sun boiled over the horizon, each release of the shutter was not one picture, but five. Five different versions of the same heartbeat of light.

One of the five is the "average" shot, the polite, simple thing your cell phone might capture. But then—oh, then!—two shots are blasted with light, burning the sky to white-hot magnesium, digging out the secrets that were lost in the deepest, blackest shadows. And two more, plunged into a sudden twilight, to capture the very soul and furnace-heart of the sun itself and the deep hidden shadowy mysteries of the canyons.

Five shots. Five layers of information. Consider the sensor: rows and columns of microscopic eyes, each holding 12 bits of light, 12 whispers of color. I won't go deeper. The message is this: bracketing gives you five times the universe to play with. You find the essence. You find the dynamic range. You smash the limits of the simple, unfeeling sensor and see beyond what one eye, in one instant, can ever see.

This electric witchcraft, this stacking of five realities, allows you to find the gift. The gift the Muse gives you. She only comes when you're there, you see, standing on the cold rock, shivering in the dark. She breathes the light onto the world, and the good god of war—my camera, my faithful clockwork soldier—helps me capture her offerings.

This is how I see it. It gives you more to find what you, the fragile, feeling human, were truly seeing. The trick, the whole magic act, is to stay aware of the thunder in your chest, the emotion of the story unfolding, even as your fingers execute the cold mechanics of the machine.

My goal, my quest, is to plunge my hands into that mass of digital information and pull out the feeling. The vision. The RAW image is there, yes. The cold, uncaring reality captured by the sensor and its software. But my joy! My joy is using that depth, that five-fold-magic, to express my moment in that day full of moments.

Wading... wading... I found them. Forty-five brackets. Forty-five sets of five ghosts, all capturing the sun as it climbed its morning ladder. And in that pile, I found success. I found the instant I craved: the rays of sunlight bursting around the entire corona. There.

The composition was good, satisfactory. The deeper canyon, sleeping below the White Rim sandstone, is visible. The rocks at my very feet are kissed with the first reds of refracted light.

The only fault, the single crack in the crystal, is the sky.

A sterile, steel-blue, cloudless sky. No texture. No grand galleons of vapor to make the morning interesting. It was an empty stage. The story of that morning wasn't up. It was down, in the fire pouring into the canyons below.

Within me, I was seeing the wonder of it all. I felt it. My hope, my ardor, are to find that wonder in my digital palette of digital information, my electronic paintbox, so I can share what I truly saw.

The post-processing continues. The sifting. The moments, the stories, they are just now unfolding, waking up, cascading like sparks, like memories, into the pages of that day lived out on the cliff's edge.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

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

'

Being there...

I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date! No time to say "Hello, Good Bye" I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!
-- a White Rabbit

I’m late. The drive across Utah is ahead of me but my grand 04:30 departure for Canyonlands was being held hostage by frozen water. 

An unexpected frost had formed but wasn't merely on the windshield; it was fused to it, a stubborn, crystalline cataract that had no intention of yielding to a plastic scraper.

It was a particularly stubborn variety, immune to scraping and interested only in melting on its own leisurely schedule. And so I sat, engine running, defrost blasting, watching the world through a crystalline filter. It was one of those forced pauses in life, a precious opportunity to sit quietly with my old friend Patience as she wove time, she always make for a good visit when you have no other choice.

There are moments in life when the universe, in a rare fit of organizational competence, appears to line everything up just for you. The weather is cool, the forecast is devoid of rain, and a good friend—a fellow of such unimpeachable character that he shall remain anonymous, mostly to protect him from association with what follows—happens to be camping practically on the doorstep of your photographic ambitions. It was, in short, the perfect alignment of the universe for a photographic expedition to Canyonlands National Park. The plan, as all my best plans are, was a model of military precision: arise at the unholy hour of 03:50, brew a press of coffee strong enough to dissolve a spoon, and be on the road by 04:30. This would grant me a leisurely two hours for the drive and a full hour for setup before the sun, with its scheduled 07:26 appearance, began its daily performance.

Naturally, that same universe, having dangled this tantalizing carrot of perfect order, promptly went back to its usual state of mild chaos. I actually departed at 5:20, a time when my schedule dictated I should have been halfway to Utah, manfully sipping coffee, decanted from my 48 oz Stanly French press.

As I climbed the switchbacks toward the mesa top of Island in the Sky, the dome surrounding me was already blushing with the day's first light. The much-vaunted "dark skies" of the park were being rudely undermined by the persistent, insomniac glow of Moab off in the distance to my left. So much for cosmic purity. I motored on, keeping to a saintly pace just under the speed limit—a courtesy I extend to park wildlife who have yet to master the Green Cross Code. This piety was apparently not shared by the drivers of a Tacoma and a Jeep, who blew past me in a great hurry, presumably late for a very important appointment with the view of some rocks. I, of course, was also late, but we shall draw a veil over that.

On the way, I passed the parking lot for Mesa Arch and was astonished to see it was already full with Adventure Vans and SUVs already lining the entrance road into the lot. It looked like a gathering of the faithful on a scale not seen since Woodstock, only with more Gore-Tex and significantly more expensive camera equipment. What frantic, elbow-jostling ritual was unfolding over at the Arch at that ungodly hour was a mystery I was content to leave to my imagination.

I rolled into the Grand View lot at 7:10, and in a piece of timing so precise it could only have been accidental, I passed my friend as he was driving out and I was driving in. We exchanged the sort of grunt that passes for "hello" among men before 8 AM, and he kindly relieved me of my partly extended tripod, transforming instantly from a sleepy camper into a stoic sherpa.

My goal for the day was deeply, wonderfully nerdy: to continue my ongoing spiritual communion with my new Nikon Z8. I am still learning how the sensor interprets light, which is a bit like learning the private dialect of a new and complex friend. I busied myself with the arcane ritual of shooting five-shot brackets, fiddling with three different zoom lenses, and generally talking to myself in a low, continuous murmur, a habit my friend is kind enough to ignore. He stood by, a dependable and heroic guardian against the perils of changing lenses on a dusty cliff edge.

This morning received my score of 7 out of 10. The light, I must admit, was lovely, bathing the canyons in a warm, buttery glow. But the sky! It was a vast, empty, cloudless dome of the most boring steel-blue imaginable. Photographers, you see, are a contrary bunch. We want clouds, but not too many. We want drama, but not a full-blown tempest that obscures the sun entirely. We are, in short, impossible to please. My tardiness also meant the sun was ready to expose it’s face on the horizon, and the long, mysterious shadows I’d hoped to capture were already in hasty retreat.

After exhausting the possibilities at Grand View and the Green River Overlook, we pointed the truck toward Moab and the siren song of a diner breakfast. At the Moab Diner, where breakfast is served ‘anytime’ (a word of profound beauty), we were seated in ten minutes and eating shortly after. It was a symphony of sizzling bacon and clattering cutlery.

The work, of course, was only just beginning. Back home, the digital harvest had to be brought in. A faintly ludicrous 1,347 images, consuming 42.3 gigabytes of memory, had to be copied, backed up, and then backed up again. In the old days, that would have been enough film to document the entire Napoleonic Wars. Now, it’s just a Friday morning. There are brackets to merge, focus stacks to assemble, and panoramas to stitch. It is a mountain of data to climb. But as with all things, you just have to take the risk, wade into the chaos, and see what you find. Expect failure, but by all means, enjoy the lesson, and find something good to keep with you.

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

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

The Never-Ending Rain

The Never-Ending Rain: An Essay

Oct 16, 2:42 PM

It never rains in the desert, except when it pours. And pours. And pours. Out here on the Colorado Plateau, we’re currently sandwiched between the soggy remnants of Hurricane Priscilla, which has since wandered off to bother the Midwest, and a new tropical storm named Raymond, who is currently doing donuts off the coast of Central America before he too, follows the conga line of this fall’s dominant Rossby Wave and pays us a fruitful visit. We’ve had floods, the kind that re-sculpt the very land we stand on, and yet, we adapt. We survive. It’s a comforting thought, a little glimmer of hope for the future of our species.

When I roam this incredible landscape, I’m surrounded by the ghosts of landscapes past, written in the language of Jurassic and Triassic rock. And if you think a week of hurricane rain is a big deal, let me tell you about a time when it rained. And rained. And rained. For two million years. Yes, you read that right. Two. Million. Years. The Earth, our steadfast and ever-changing home, threw a geological tantrum of epic proportions, and the evidence is etched into the very stones beneath my feet. It’s one of the many stories that can be read in the hardened pages of rock, a tale pieced together by dedicated geologists who’ve spent their lives deciphering the clues. There are a few basics you’ll need to follow along, but trust me, it’s quite the ride.

The story, as best as we can tell it today, goes something like this. The world back then, during the late Triassic, was a hot, dry place. The supercontinent of Pangea was just beginning to feel the tell-tale rumbles of an impending breakup. Tectonic plates were getting restless, stretching and straining like a grumpy cat after a long nap. This continental fidgeting manifested itself in a spectacular display of volcanism, a chain of fire-breathing mountains and fissures that would make Mordor look like a quaint little village. The star of this show was the Wrangellian eruptions, a series of flood basalt eruptions in what is now Alaska and British Columbia. We’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill, cone-shaped volcano here. These were colossal fissures in the Earth's crust that bled lava for over five million years, creating a volcanic province over one hundred times larger than any supervolcano we can imagine. The magma, bubbling up from the planet's depths at a blistering 1600°C, may have even ignited vast, untapped coal beds, adding a whole new level of smoky, atmospheric chaos to the mix.

Now, volcanoes are not just about the flashy lava flows. They are masters of atmospheric alchemy, releasing invisible gases that can alter the climate for millennia. These Wrangellian eruptions pumped the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and methane, effectively wrapping the planet in a thick, heat-trapping blanket. CO2 levels skyrocketed to over 1000 parts per million, more than two and a half times what they are today. (though we are trying our best it seems to match it, but thats another story for another day) Global temperatures soared by as much as 10 degrees Celsius. The air grew thick, heavy, and saturated with moisture. To add insult to injury, the volcanoes also spewed out hydrogen sulfide gas, which, when mixed with water and oxygen, creates good old-fashioned acid rain.

This combination of extreme heat and a souped-up, moisture-laden atmosphere was the perfect recipe for a supercharged water cycle. The warm oceans evaporated at an accelerated rate, sending colossal amounts of water vapor into the sky. This moisture condensed into storm systems of unimaginable size and ferocity, creating a feedback loop of warmth and water that just wouldn’t quit. For two million years, the heavens opened, and the rain began. It wasn’t a gentle spring shower, either. This was a deluge of biblical proportions, a relentless, planet-drowning storm that transformed the very face of the Earth.

The consequences were, as you might imagine, catastrophic. Continents drowned, rivers swelled into inland seas, and lush forests rotted into stagnant swamps. The relentless rain stripped mountains and highlands bare, washing away fertile topsoil and choking the oceans with sediment. The once-arid interior of Pangea, a vast and dusty desert, was now a humid, waterlogged wasteland. The sun, hidden behind a perpetual curtain of storm clouds, could no longer provide the energy needed for photosynthesis, and plant life withered and died. Oxygen levels plummeted, creating vast "dead zones" in the oceans where nothing could survive.

It was a global environmental collapse of the highest order. The old guard of the Triassic, the species that had thrived in the hot, dry world, were wiped out. But as is always the case in the grand, dramatic story of our planet, with death comes opportunity. The Carnian Pluvial Episode, this two-million-year-long rainstorm, cleared the stage for a new cast of characters. And waiting in the wings, ready for their moment in the spotlight, were the dinosaurs. These adaptable, resilient creatures were perfectly suited to the new, wet world, and in the wake of the great dying, they rose to prominence, beginning a reign that would last for over 150 million years.

So, as I watch the muddy waters of the Colorado River rush past, swollen with the remnants of yet another hurricane, I can’t help but feel a strange sense of connection to that ancient, waterlogged world. The rocks around me are a silent testament to the planet's incredible power, its capacity for both destruction and creation. And in that story, in the rise and fall of ancient ecosystems and the inexorable march of life, there is a lesson for us all. We adapt. We survive. And in the face of even the most dramatic and terrifying changes, there is always hope for a new beginning.

Thanks for stopping by and having a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

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

Storm Chasing

Rain
I don't mind
Shine
The weathers fine

   --John Lennon & Paul McCartney

You don’t generally expect to find a Pacific hurricane loitering about in the high desert of Colorado, but then, nature rarely consults a map. Hurricane Priscilla, having evidently grown tired of the coast, decided to wander inland and give us a proper soaking. Now, I’m not one to complain about a bit of rain—goodness knows we need it—but this was something else. Just to our east, the little town of Paonia was doing its best impression of Atlantis, finding itself submerged under an astonishing nine inches of water. We, on the comparatively more arid western part of the Western Slope of the Rockies, got off with a mere two-point-one-four inches, which was still enough to turn the landscape into a vast, uncooperative puddle and put a firm kibosh on any storm-chasing heroics. The only safe place to be was on asphalt, which, for a landscape photographer, is roughly equivalent to being told to stay on the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon.

Still, there was magic afoot. A lovely, moody fog was pouring over the escarpment of the Grand Valley like dry ice in a school play. So, naturally, I did what any sensible person would do: I grabbed my tripod, my camera go bag, and drove straight into the thick of it, up into the Colorado National Monument.

For the next few hours, my life consisted of a repeating, and frankly rather daft, little cycle. I’d sit in my truck, listening to the drumming of rain on the roof, a sound that is cozy for precisely ten minutes and then becomes a kind of maddening reminder that indeed it is raining, thank you. A momentary lull would occur, and I’d bolt from the cab like a man escaping a perfumed candle shop, frantically fire off a few shots, and then scramble back inside as the heavens opened once more. This was followed by the delicate ritual of cleaning every last drop of water from the lens and camera barrel, only to repeat the whole soggy enterprise moments later.

1 1/3 stop bracket shots

Now, what I was capturing out there are called bracketed exposures, which is a wonderfully technical term for taking the same picture three times: one too dark, one too bright, and one that Goldilocks would call just right. You then mash them all together in the computer to create an HDR, or High Dynamic Range, image. The point of all this fumbling around is to get an image where you can see the details in the gloomy shadows without the bright bits looking like they’ve been bleached by an mad angel. When all this data is given equal weight you get an nice clean unrealistic HDR result. With the new generations of cameras can take many multiples of the same exposure at varying levels of exposure stops giving the editor a wealth of data captured by the sensor which is then turned into the final imagee, which is information part of the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom sequence.

Equally weighted meged bracket trio - HDR -High Dynamic Range

As a curiosity, the first image I edit out is one in which each image of the triad has equal weight. This image suggests a mildly overcast, damp afternoon—pleasant, even. It in no way captures the reality of the moment, which sometimes felt like being inside a car wash. My camera did exactly what I told it to do, but now my job is to edit the thing until it reflects what I remember, my personal reality—the feeling of the cold, the sound of the rain, the wind pushing the tripod, the sheer drama of it all. As I like to say in full cynical mockery, I’ve brought home my prey; now I just have to clean, dress, and cook it.

This is an image captured at the peak of fog movement just as the rain started again. The only editing I have done on the image is the digital removal of raindrops on the lens.

And as if the day weren't surreal enough, I was not alone. The parking area where I had perched my truck served a very, very small shed—a pavilion, really, placed ther for observing the sunrise.. And in that pavilion, a wedding was taking place. A wedding! I am pretty sure the plan had been a glorious, cliff-edge ceremony, with the happy couple exchanging vows against a backdrop of geological splendor. Instead, thanks to Priscilla, they were crammed, along with friends and family, into a structure where a family of five might find the bench seating a bit of a squeeze. There wasn't so much a wedding party as a little league baseball team huddled in a dugout trying to stay dry.

From the dry comfort of my truck, I watched the wedding photographer, a true hero of her craft, trying to orchestrate memorable shots while keeping the couple dry under a single, valiant umbrella. And in my mind all was wonderful. The bride and groom were beaming. If you can stand together in the middle of a repurposed monsoon, their family stuffed into a glorified bus stop, and still smile at each other like that, out in the rain with flowing fog obscuring their joy, well, you’ve got a pretty good start on things. And we do what we do: we find a way to get happily married despite the rain. If they could smile, and be happy with each other in the middle of a Pacific Monsoon named Priscilla then they have a good beginning. Nature did what nature does. She gives us challenges, we overcome, we evolve, and humanity grows.

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

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

'

in which he has music and muses

Hopelessly passing your time in the grassland away
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air
You better watch out
There may be dogs about
I've looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel
What a surprise

      -- Sheep, Pink Floyd,  Raving and Drooling, Sheep, Live, 1974

Muse -- Greek mythological goddesses of inspiration, a person who inspires an artist, the act of thinking deeply

Note: this is my 40th narrative. And here it is.

Out here, in the high desert, a deep rain is an event, a deviation from the norm. This one began sometime before midnight. We knew because the summer’s accumulated heat, having retreated deep into the rock, allowed for open windows. There is a specific kind of restfulness that comes from listening to a firm, gentle rain while you are lost in sleep, a sound that is both a presence and an absence. Of course, it has its other side. The sound is a lullaby, but the water itself can be a menace. When the ground becomes saturated, it sheds the excess into the arroyos and canyons, filling them with a sudden, churning anger. Rain muffles the world, smothers sound, and in doing so can drown out the warning of a predator skulking near the edge of the light.

The distances here are geological. Roads run straight and long, engineered lines across immense, unpeopled landscapes where you can legally set a cruise control at eighty miles per hour and travel from one nowhere to the next in the time it takes for a memory to pass. I tend to listen to music on these transits. It is a way to key out memories, to entertain the solitary mind, for on these photographic journeys I am almost always alone. The GMRS radio is on, scanning, its occasional squawk of chatter an interruption that pulls me out of my musings and back into the truck, a useful anchor. There are, after all, many realities. When you are moving at eighty miles per hour in a truck that is a quarter-century old, it pays to check in with the immediate one before drifting off again.

The audio system in the T100 recently had to be replaced. Its predecessor, a Kenwood unit, finally succumbed to the accumulated heat of countless desert crossings. It died with a certain integrity. The controls on the faceplate all went numb at once, a complete systems failure. The problem was a mix CD, one I’d been playing with the volume set high enough to feel the bass through the floorboards. With the controls inert, the only way to silence it was to kill the ignition. For a few days, before I found the time to pull the dashboard apart and unplug the harness, any trip was accompanied by thirty-eight minutes of unalterable, high-volume rock and roll. It was good rock, fortunately, but at town speeds it was loud. My apologies to anyone who was around, particularly on nights when I’d roll into the drive late. Raccoon-time late.

I photograph, and when I am running across the desert in the pre-dawn dark, waiting to point a camera into the morning light, I often contemplate the persistence of this compulsion. The why of it. A large part of it, I know, is the sense that I have captured an instance, pinning a single moment against the vast volumes of time laid out before me. Time, history, rock—it is an inescapable theme. Each sunrise adds or subtracts from the ledger; a new layer of aeolian sand is laid down, or a few more chips of an old one blow away.

You can see how a grain of sand was captured by striking a rock a good whack with a hammer, revealing a fresh face. A single grain contains a surprising volume of information, and the stronger the hand lens, the more you can learn. The story is written on its surface. Pock marks tell you it was aeolian, blown by the wind, its journey a series of tiny, abrading collisions with other grains. A deeper look, through a microscope, reveals the conchoidal fractures typical of quartz. We know them as percussion marks. If the grain is smooth, shiny, and round as a marble, it was tumbled in the surf, perfected by the back-and-forth scour of waves on a long-vanished beach. This is how you read the rock. There are many stories to learn to be able to know a grain of sand.

The patterns of deposition—how those sands were laid down—tell you still more about the paleoenvironment of those accumulated moments. Sand blown by the wind but captured in a lake will be cemented with clays. The cements in paleodunes speak of the water that flowed through them over millennia, concentrating minerals, binding the grains together. The stories are all there. You learn the themes, identify the minerals, trace your way up and down a formation. The pages and narrative are complete, waiting to be read.

When I am out there, seeking the moments I wish to photograph, I listen to the silence. It sharpens my concentration. It allows me to hear the ravens and the raptors on their hunts. Ravens, in their curiosity, will often swing by close, blessing me with the leathery swish of their wings as they pass. In the parks, they are assessing me for the possibility of food, of shiny wrappers and the droppings of tourists.

Now, a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder comes with me. I’ll set it on a tripod and let it run as I work the light. I have found that listening to that recorded sound takes me back to the environment where I stood with the camera helps me in the editing. My goal in editing is to reproduce what I was seeing, and for me, seeing is an act colored by emotion and illuminated by light, by the musings I have as I watch my muse—the view that is inspiring me. Listening to the audio of those moments flowing by, the wind in the junipers, the distant croak of a raven, helps recapture the daydreams I had behind the camera. It brings back the whole memory, now frozen in the moments of a dream. In these pages the dangers are real.

Thanks for stopping by for a read! 

buzzshawphoto.com

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

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.

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