Buzz Shaw Photography

24 November 2025

revisiting Composition

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then"

–Alice

There is a peculiar form of madness that compels otherwise sensible people to strap forty pounds of glass and aluminum to their backs, trudge into the wilderness at an hour when reasonable people are still REM-sleeping, and stand freezing on a cliff just to capture a picture of a rock.

I should know; I have done it often.

But if you are going to commit to this delightful absurdity, you might as well come back with something that doesn’t look like an accidental pocket-dial photo. To do that, one must master two things: the artistic arrangement of the world (Composition) and the bewilderingly complex button-mashing required to capture it (Workflow).

Here is how to manage the chaos, or at least organize it.

Part I: Arranging the Furniture (Composition)

The world is a messy place. Particularly mine it seems. Nature drops trees wherever it feels like it and leaves mountains lying around in heaps. Your job is to impose order on this chaos.

The Tri-Planar Arrangement

Most bad landscape photos suffer from being terribly flat. To fix this, you need to think of your photo like a sandwich or a theatrical stage. You need layers.

The Foreground: This is the "Hello, come in" mat. It’s a rock, a shrub, or a patch of interesting dirt right in front of your boots. It anchors the viewer so they don’t feel like they’re falling out of the frame.
The Midground: The filling. The bit that connects the close stuff to the far stuff.
The Background: The hero. The jagged peak or the exploding sunset. Without the other two, this is just a postcard. With them, it’s a place.

Leading Lines

Human eyes are sluggish. They need to be told where to go. A "leading line" is just a polite visual usher. It’s a river, a fence, or a ridge that says, "Right this way, please, towards the mountain." Without it, the viewer’s eye just bounces around the frame like a pinball until it gets bored and leaves.

The Rule of Thirds

Imagine a Tic-Tac-Toe board drawn over your viewfinder. The rule states, with almost religious dogmatism, that you must never put the horizon in the middle. It is considered the height of poor taste. Put the horizon on the top line or the bottom line. Put the tree on the vertical line. If you put the subject dead center, it looks like a mugshot.

Visual Weight

Objects have "weight." A dark, massive boulder on the right side of your photo will tip the whole image over unless you balance it with something on the left—perhaps a lighter, smaller tree. It is a visual seesaw. You are trying to keep the picture from falling off the wall.

Part II: The Technical Gymnastics (Field Workflow)

Now that you have framed a lovely scene, you will discover that your camera is technologically incapable of capturing it. The sky is too bright, the shadows are too dark, and the lens can’t focus on everything at once.

To compensate, we must cheat.

1. The Panorama (Making it Bigger)

You want to capture the vastness of the Grand Canyon, but your lens only sees a slice. You must shoot a panorama.

The Trick: Turn the camera vertical (portrait orientation). This seems counterintuitive, but it gives you more sky and ground to work with.
The Headache: You must rotate the camera, not around your body, but around the lens’s "nodal point." If you don’t do this, objects in the foreground will shift relative to the background (parallax), and the software later will have a nervous breakdown trying to stitch it together.
The Workflow: Level the tripod. (Seriously, level it). Snap, rotate, snap, rotate. Overlap by half. Do not sneeze.

2. Focus Stacking (Defying Physics)

You want that flower three inches from the lens to be sharp, but you also want the mountain ten miles away to be sharp. Physics says "No." Physics dictates that you can only have one plane of focus.

The Solution: Take a picture focused on the flower. Then focus a little further back. Click. Further back. Click. Repeat until you are focusing on the horizon.
The Result: You now have ten photos, each blurry in a different way, which you will mash together later to create one photo that defies optical reality.

3. Exposure Bracketing (The Goldilocks Method)

The sun is screaming bright; the canyon floor is pitch black. Your sensor cannot handle both.

The Solution: Take three photos. One underexposed (dark, to save the sky). One normal. One overexposed (bright, to see into the shadows).
The Workflow: Set your camera to "Auto Exposure Bracket." It goes click-click-click. Later, you will merge them into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image, which sounds technical but really just means "an image where you can actually see things."2

4. Pixel Shifting (The Overachiever)

Some fancy cameras will vibrate their sensor by a single micron between shots to capture better color data.

The Warning: This requires the camera to be as still as a corpse. If the wind blows a leaf, or if a squirrel runs past, you will get digital "ghosting," which looks like a glitch in the Matrix. Use only on days when the earth itself seems to have stopped spinning.

Part III: The Ritual of Organization

By the end of the shoot, you will have 400 photos. 10 are panoramas, 50 are focus stacks, and the rest are mistakes. How do you tell them apart?

The "Hand" Bookend

This is the most sophisticated tool in my arsenal: my own hand.

Before I start a complicated sequence (like a 10-shot focus stack), I hold my hand in front of the lens and take a picture. I do the sequence. Then I take a picture of my hand again.

When I get home and look at the tiny thumbnails on my computer, I see: Hand -> Bunch of Photos -> Hand. I know immediately that everything between the hands belongs together. It looks ridiculous in the field, but it saves hours of squinting at monitors later.

The Digital Pile

When you get the files onto your computer, do not leave them in a folder called "New Folder (4)." You will die of old age trying to find them.

Rename immediately: 2025-11-24_Location_Subject.
The Stack: In your software (Lightroom, etc.), take those ten focus-stacked images and "Group" or "Stack" them immediately. Hide the clutter. If you don't, your library will look like a digital landfill.

The Golden Rule of Processing

Merge first, edit later. Combine your brackets or your stacks into a single master file before you start playing with the colors. If you try to color-grade ten different source files before merging them, you are essentially trying to butter the bread before you’ve baked it.

Of course, having just burdened you with enough technical rigidities to stifle a tax accountant, I feel obligated to share the most confounding paradox of the whole endeavor: the very best course of action is often to disregard every word of it.

There comes a moment in the field, usually when the light is doing something preposterous and fleeting—when checking your histogram feels about as relevant as checking your credit score. At that point, you must simply fling the rulebook off the nearest precipice and try to capture not just the photons bouncing off a rock, but the actual sensation of being there.

And being there is rarely just about the visual splendor. A truly honest landscape photograph is a container for a complex cocktail of human conditions. It captures the profound drowsiness of having woken up at an hour when the only other conscious beings are bakers and serial killers. It records the gnawing, hollow realization that you left your granola bar in the car, which is now a vertical mile below you. It documents the low-level irritation of a wind that seems personally vindictive, finding the one gap in your layers that you swore was sealed.

But then, a strange thing happens. As you stand there—shivering, hungry, and wondering why you didn't take up a sensible hobby like stamp collecting—a quiet mania descends. You enter a state of satisfying, rhythmic concentration. You stop feeling the cold. You stop thinking about the bagel you aren’t eating. You become singular in your purpose, fiddling with dials and aligning glass with a focus that borders on the religious.

You are working to communicate with your muse, which is a lofty way of saying you are trying to wrestle a small rectangular slice of a magnificent universe into a box that makes sense. And when the shutter clicks, and you know you’ve got it—when the chaos of the world aligns into a rectangle of perfect order—you feel a wash of internal contentment that is almost warm enough to replace the coffee you don't have.

You have captured beauty, yes, but you have also captured your own stubborn presence within it. And that, really, is the only reason we go out there at all.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

22 November 2025

On Tripods

“The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

The Great Aluminum Burden: A Complete Guide to the Tripod

There is a very specific sort of madness involved in landscape photography. It involves voluntarily strapping a three-legged skeleton to your back—an object that seems designed primarily to catch on every low-hanging branch in the Northern Hemisphere, and hiking up a hill until your lungs are making noises like a broken accordion.

You do this because you have been told, with great authority, that you need a tripod. And, annoyingly, the experts are right.

It begins with a fundamental flaw in your biology. You might think you are standing still. You aren't. You are a biological sack of pulses, twitches, and caffeine-induced tremors. To a camera sensor trying to capture a high-definition world, you are about as stable as a nervous chihuahua on a washing machine. The tripod is the only thing that provides the sort of granite-like stability required to make a leaf look like a leaf rather than a vague green fuzz.

But beyond simple sharpness, the tripod is a time machine. Here is the full catalog of reasons you must endure the weight.

1. The Business of Time and Flow (Long Exposure)

Consider the waterfall. You know those photos where the water looks like a cascade of angelic hair, or the ocean looks like dry ice? That requires keeping the shutter open for several seconds. If you try to hold a camera in your hands for two full seconds, you will not get angelic hair. You will get a blurry, impressionistic mess that looks like you dropped the camera in a swamp. The tripod holds the thing perfectly rigid, allowing the water to move while the rocks stay put.

2. Chasing the Cosmos (Astrophotography)

Cameras are surprisingly needy when the sun goes down. To see in the dark, they must leave their eye open for 15 or 30 seconds to gather the faint light of dead suns. If you attempt this handheld, the stars will not look like diamonds; they will look like the frantic scribbles of a toddler. To capture the Milky Way, you need the iron legs to hold the camera still while the earth rotates beneath it.

3. The Tiny World (Macro)

If you decide to photograph something very small—a beetle, say, or the dew on a spiderweb—you will discover a cruel law of physics: depth of field. When you are that close, the area in focus is razor-thin, perhaps a millimeter deep. If you are hand-holding the camera and you breathe, or even think about breathing, you will sway forward three millimeters and the focus is gone. The tripod locks you in place, turning the impossible geometry of the insect world into something manageable.

4. The Wide View (Panoramas)

Sometimes the world is too big for your lens. You want to take five photos across the horizon and stitch them together. If you do this handheld, you will inevitably bob up and down like a cork in the ocean. When you get home, your photos won't line up—the mountains will look jagged and the horizon will tilt like a sinking ship. A leveled tripod allows you to sweep across the scene with the precision of a surveying instrument.

5. The Dark Arts of Fidgeting (Advanced Techniques)

Then there are the techniques that border on computer wizardry. These are the moments when the tripod transitions from "helpful accessory" to "absolute mandatory requirement," because you are attempting to trick physics.

The "Slicing the Bread" Trick (Focus Stacking):
There is a frustrating reality in photography where you cannot get everything in focus at once. If you shoot a landscape with a flower right in front of your lens, you can have a sharp flower and a blurry mountain, or a sharp mountain and a blurry flower. To fix this, you must "stack."
This involves taking a sequence of ten, twenty, or even fifty photos of the exact same scene, but moving the focus point a fraction of a millimeter deeper into the image each time. Later, you feed these into a computer which stitches the sharp bits together. It is like slicing a loaf of bread and reassembling it to make a better loaf. If you try this handheld, you will sway. When the software tries to align your fifty photos, it will realize that in frame one the flower was in the center, and in frame ten it was drifting toward the corner. The result is a digital hallucination. The tripod ensures the camera remains frozen in space while the lens does the work.
The Goldilocks Maneuver (Exposure Bracketing):
The human eye is a marvelous thing; it can look at a sunset and see the brilliant orange sun and the dark green grass simultaneously. Cameras, bless them, are rather stupid. They panic. They either give you a beautiful sun and pitch-black grass, or lovely grass and a sky that looks like a nuclear explosion.
To fix this, you have to bracket. You take one photo that is underexposed (dark, to catch the sky), one that is overexposed (bright, to catch the shadows), and one that is just right. Then you mash them together. If you attempt this without a tripod, the trees in the "dark" photo will not line up with the trees in the "bright" photo. When you merge them, the edges of the leaves will have a strange, vibrating ghostly aura, looking as if the landscape has been drinking heavily.
Atomic-Level Fidgeting (Pixel Shifting):
This is a relatively new form of sorcery found in high-end cameras. In this mode, the camera takes a picture, then physically moves its own sensor by the width of a single pixel—a distance so small it is practically theoretical—and takes another, repeating this four or sixteen times. It does this to capture an obscene amount of color data and resolution.
We are talking about movements measured in microns. If a fly sneezes three counties away, it might be enough vibration to ruin the shot. If you are holding the camera, your pulse alone will register as a magnitude 7 earthquake. You need a tripod so heavy and stable that it feels like a piece of civil engineering.

6. Saving Your Arms (Telephoto Support)

If you are shooting wildlife or sports, you are likely holding a lens the size and weight of a thermos flask filled with lead. Holding this to your eye for three hours is not photography; it is cross-fit training. A tripod (or monopod) bears the weight, preventing your arms from turning to jelly and ensuring you are actually looking through the viewfinder when the eagle finally decides to fly.

7. The One-Legged Compromise (The Monopod)

Sometimes, however, deploying a full tripod is impossible. You might be in a crowded market where three splayed legs would trip a grandmother. Enter the Monopod.

The monopod is a fascinating admission of defeat. It is, essentially, an expensive walking stick with a screw on top. It admits that you are too weak to hold the lens, but too impatient to set up a tripod. It won't let you shoot the stars, but if you are trying to photograph a rugby player or a fleeing gazelle, it allows you to swivel and pan without dropping your gear in the mud.

8. The Carbon Fiber Question

Eventually, you will find yourself in a shop, weeping at the prices. The salesperson will point you toward Carbon Fiber.

It is a material seemingly harvested from alien spacecraft. It is the platinum standard because:

Weight: Aluminum has the density of a dying star. Carbon fiber weighs about as much as a hearty sandwich.
Vibration: Aluminum rings like a bell; carbon fiber is "dead," absorbing the shock of the wind.
Temperature: Aluminum sucks the heat out of your hands in winter; carbon fiber stays neutral.
You pay a premium for this, effectively paying more money to get less weight, but your spine will thank you.

9. A Note on Hygiene (The Boring Bit)

Warning: If you take your tripod to the beach or windblown desert, it will betray you. Tripod legs are telescoping tubes filled with grease. Sand loves grease.

If you do not clean your tripod after a trip to the coast, the sand will work its way into the threads. The next time you extend a leg, it will make a sound like someone chewing on glass—scrrrunccch—and eventually seize up entirely. You must disassemble and clean it, which is tedious, but better than owning a permanently frozen stick.

The Verdict

It is heavy. It is cumbersome. It will almost certainly pinch your fingers in a blood-blistering way at least once per trip.

But physics is a cruel and unyielding mistress. She dictates that stability equals clarity. If you want your photos to possess that breathless, hyper-real crispness that makes viewers stop and stare, you cannot cheat. You must carry the burden. You must suffer the weight. You must bring the tripod.

Thanks for stopping by for a read!

buzzshawphoto.com

18 November 2025

Mesozoic

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. -- Joseph Conrad

The air in the lungs has been heavy these last weeks, a traveler's weary souvenir from the metal tubes we fling across the sky. I have been moving through the world, sharing the recycled breath of a thousand strangers, packed shoulder to shoulder in those flying petri dishes where humanity ferments. The result was a fog in the head, a hibernation of the spirit. The creativity retreated, hiding in the back of the brain like a small, frightened animal waiting for the storm to pass. I was getting things done, yes, but without the spark, without the fire.

But yesterday, the fog lifted just enough. I wandered back into the digital darkroom, into the glow of Luminar Neo, to summon ghosts from the machine. I held the hard prints in my hands—paper and ink, trying to capture the fleeting soul of a morning. It is a struggle, always. To catch the sunrise, that precise instant when the sun cracks the horizon and spills gold into the canyon, is one thing; to make it live on a wall, to keep the deep shadows from swallowing the secrets of the rock, is another.

But the work continues. I am, I realize, a photojournalist of the Deep Time.

The Canyonlands are not just rock; they are a library of dust and bone, and I am walking through the stacks. The Colorado Plateau is a book written in layers of sand and silence. Lately, I have been thinking not of the strata I photograph, but of the great, long dream of the Mesozoic, that vast middle life of the world. A span of 186 million years. It is a story of fire, and flowers, and the terrible lizard kings.

Let us step back. Let us rewind the clock, spin the hands backward until they blur and fall off.

The Triassic: The Waking World (252 Ma – 201 Ma)

It began in silence. The Great Dying had passed, leaving the earth a graveyard. But life is stubborn; it crawls from the wreckage. For fifty million years, the world was a single giant landmass, Pangaea, hot and dry and red. It was a world of recovery, a bruised planet licking its wounds.

Then, the sky broke. Not a spring shower, but a deluge that lasted two million years, the Carnian Pluvial. The volcanoes of Wrangellia screamed, the heavens opened, and the red dust turned to mud. In this wet, steaming world, the actors took their places. The archosaurs, the "ruling lizards," learned to breathe the thin air with lungs like bellows. And in the shadows, small and unnoticed, around 240 million years ago, the first dinosaurs appeared. Nyasasaurus, Eoraptor, they were not kings yet; they were the understudies, waiting in the wings while the armored aetosaurs and the crocodile-like phytosaurs ruled the rivers.

But the stage was being set. The world broke apart, the volcanoes of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province roared their fire, and the old rulers were swept away in the End-Triassic extinction. The curtain rose for the main act.

The Jurassic: The Giants Walk (201 Ma – 145 Ma)

Now the world widens. Pangaea cracks like an old plate, drifting apart. The Atlantic opens its watery eye for the first time. This was the high summer of the earth, a warm, tropical greenhouse with no ice at the poles to cool the fever.

And oh, the giants! This was the time of the thunder-lizards. The sauropods: Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, had necks like suspension bridges, stripping the tops of the conifers. The earth shook under them. In the green shadows, the Allosaurus hunted, a nightmare of teeth and claw.

And something else happened, a miracle in the stone. A lizard grew feathers. Archaeopteryx took a clumsy leap from the Solnhofen limestone and found the air, a bridge between the reptile and the bird. In the dark underbrush, beneath the footfalls of titans, the mammals, our ancient ancestors, scurried small, nocturnal, waiting for their turn in the sun.

The Cretaceous: The Seas and the Flowers (145 Ma – 66 Ma)

The continents drifted further, restless wanderers. The ocean floors swelled, pushing the seas up by 250 meters above today's levels, until they spilled over the land. North America was cut in two by a great Western Interior Seaway, a vast inland ocean teeming with monsters, the mosasaurs, the plesiosaurs, dark shapes gliding in the sunless depths where the oxygen failed, and the black shale was born.

On land, a revolution of color. For eons, the world had been green and brown. Now, suddenly: flowers! The angiosperms burst forth in the Mid-Cretaceous, an "abominable mystery" of petals and pollen. Bees hummed for the first time. The air was sweet.

The mountains began to crumple and rise in the west, the Sevier, the Laramide, the ancestors of the Rockies pushing up through the crust, shedding their dust into the sea to build the layers I photograph today. The dinosaurs reached their peak complexity: the horned Triceratops, the duck-billed hadrosaurs, and the tyrant king himself, T. rex, stalking the humid forests.

The Great Silence (66 Ma)

And then, the sky fell.

Sixty-six million years ago. A rock the size of a mountain, traveling through the cold dark of space, found the Yucatán. The impact was a second sun. Firestorms swept the globe. The forests burned. The dust rose and choked the sun, and a long, cold winter fell upon the earth. The photosynthesis stopped. The food chains snapped. The great lizards, who had ruled for one hundred and eighty million years, starved in the dark. The silence returned.

But in the ashes, life stirred. The small, the scavengers, the ones who could live on scraps and seeds—the birds, the crocodiles, and yes, the mammals—crawled out from their burrows. The monsters were gone. The world was ours to inherit.

The Present

Now, outside my window, the cycle turns again. The snows are coming to the mountains, adding their white icing to the peaks. The heat and wildfire smoke are gone, and the quiet cold of November settles in. We need the winter. We need the snowpack to melt in the spring, to carve the canyons a little deeper, to write the next line in the great stone book.

I will go out soon to photograph the white mountains. The photojournalist returns to the beat, documenting the slow, beautiful grinding of time.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

04 November 2025

Seeing

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

Seeing

The room is twilight dark, save for the electric ghost of the monitor.

Here I sit, a man in a chair, multiple hundreds of years from the campfire mystics, yet doing the same thing. I am staring into a fire. My fire is a rectangle of captured light, a digital window. On the screen, a photograph. And in the photograph, a canyon.

No, not a canyon. The canyon. The Grand View Point from Canyonlands. I am perched, electronically, on the sheer, red-rock vertigo of the Wingate Sandstone, looking out. And down.

I am editing. A simple word for a strange magic. I am sliding levers, whispering to the shadows, coaxing the highlights. I am working through a deep well of digital information, artifacts not of pottery or bone, but of photons. I am looking for the truth of the moment I stood there, chilled by an early morning’s high-desert breeze.

But the machine is slower, than my mind is fast. As the pixels churn, my mind... drifts. It slips its moorings. I am a geologist by training, and the view from this precipice is not just a landscape. It is a library. It is a stack of novels written in catastrophe, bound in silence, telling the story of a world that died a thousand times.

I am staring at Deep Time. And Deep Time, with its slow, mineral gaze, is staring back.

My mind's eye falls from the Wingate cliff, tumbling 290 million years in a single second, past the sleeping Triassic giants, down to the bottom of the view, down to the red heart of the Permian.

The Red World (Organ Rock)

I see it, clear as the image on my screen. The lowest, reddest layer. The Organ Rock Formation.

It is not a desert. Not yet. This world is wet, and slow, and rusting.

This is a world of mud. A broad, flat coastal plain that stretches to a horizon you can't quite see, a horizon lost in hazy, iron-rich air. The sky is a different color. The sun is a different star. This is 290 million years ago.

Geology calls this a "fluvial system." A lovely, sterile name. I call it the Land of Sluggish Rivers. Rivers born in mountains I will never see—the Uncompahgre Uplift, the ancestral Rockies—bleed their sediment across this plain. They are not the clear, cold rivers of my Colorado. They are thick, silty, and slow.

I can smell it. The air smells like wet iron. Like blood. The red of this rock is not a dye; it is an oxidation. It is the color of a world breathing a new, oxygen-rich atmosphere. It is the planet’s first great rust.

In my daydream, I am standing on the banks. The silence is absolute, broken only by the sucking sound of the mudflats and the lazy slip of the river. There are no flowers. No birds. No dinosaurs. The land is populated by whispers, by strange amphibians and mammal-like reptiles hiding from the pale, distant sun.

The rivers swell. They overtop their banks, not in a rushing, violent flood, but in a slow, creeping inundation. A sheet of red-brown silt, fine as flour, blankets everything. It settles. It hardens. It waits. This is the "floodplain" deposit, the "muddy appearance" that makes up so much of this formation. It is the signature of a slow, patient, muddy world.

And then... a change. A sound.

It’s the wind.

The White Rim Sandstone overlying the Organ Rock Formation, view from Grand View Overlook, Island in the Sky, Canyonlands, National Park.

The Organ Rock (Organ Pipe) Formation in the Paradox Valley, East of Canyonlands NP, is locally known as Fisher's Rocks.

The Ghost Desert (White Rim)

The wind comes from the west. It comes from an ocean that isn't there anymore, a shallow Permian sea that lapped at the edges of this crimson plain.

And this wind carries... sand. Not red, iron-heavy mud-sand. But clean, fine, white sand.

My eye moves up the canyon wall, from the deep reds of the Organ Rock to that impossible, brilliant white line. The White Rim Sandstone. My notes call it the "frosting around the edges of the lower Canyon," and that's what it is. It’s a ribbon of pure, captured light.

Geology calls this an "eolian system." Wind-blown. A coastal desert. An "erg."

I call it a war. A slow, silent war between two worlds, fought over millennia.

In my mind, I see the landscape shift. The red rivers still flow, choking on their own mud. But from the west, the white dunes advance. They are mountains of travelling sand, ghostly and silent. They migrate, pushed by that relentless Permian wind. They creep over the mudflats. They choke the rivers.

For a time, they exist together. The transition is "intertonguing." The rivers wash their red silt into the valleys between the white dunes. The white dunes blow back, burying the red river channels. It is a dance, a push and pull. A river of mud meets a desert of bone.

I look at my photograph, at that clean, sharp line. What I am seeing is the moment the desert won.

It is a snapshot of the end of that dance. The moment the rivers finally dried, or were pushed back, or simply gave up, and the great, white, coastal desert claimed the land. The White Rim is a tombstone for the Red World. A desert of pure, wind-scoured quartz, its slopes frozen in the "large-scale cross-bedding" that shows the angle of those ancient, migrating dunes.

It is beautiful. It is sterile. It is a world scoured clean.

And then, just as my mind adjusts to this white, windy silence, the universe holds its breath.

The Great Silence (The Permian-Triassic Unconformity)

I look at the layers above the White Rim. The thin, flaky reds of the Moenkopi. But I am not looking at the rock. I am looking at the line between them.

The line is a knife cut.

My geology texts call it a "disconformity." A "major erosional surface."

I call it The Great Dying.

The screen in front of me flickers, as if in sympathy. I imagine the world after the White Rim was laid down. The land was uplifted. The shallow sea retreated. And then... fire.

Not a forest fire. A planet fire.

In Siberia, a world away, the land tore open. For two million years, volcanoes erupted. Not mountains, but fields of fire, miles long. The Siberian Traps. They poured enough lava to cover the entire United States in a crust half a mile deep.

But it wasn't the lava that killed the world. It was the breath. The poison gas. The carbon dioxide. The methane. The air became unbreathable. The oceans turned to acid.

The Permian period ended. Life on Earth nearly did, too.

Ninety percent of all marine species, gone. Seventy percent of all life on land, vanished. The world became a silent, poisoned greenhouse.

And here, in Canyonlands? Nothing.

For millions of years, no rocks were made. This isn't a transition; it's a gap. It's a chapter torn from the book. The land, uplifted and raw, was scoured by acidic winds and rain, but no new life, no new rivers, no new deserts came to cover it. The time is simply... lost.

When I stand on the White Rim and look up at the Moenkopi, I am looking across a tomb. I am staring at a gap in time that represents the greatest catastrophe this planet has ever known. The silence in those few inches of missing rock is louder than any thunder.

The World Re-Awakens (The Triassic)

My mind, shaken, climbs past that terrible, invisible line. Life, as it always does, finds a way. The planet heals. The Triassic dawns.

The next layer is the Moenkopi Formation. It’s a reddish-brown, "rippled" layer. It’s thin. It’s hesitant.

The world it represents is a shadow of the old. The sea, that Permian ocean, crept back in. But it was a different sea. A sick sea. The environment was a vast, flat, coastal plain. Sluggish rivers, yes. Tidal flats. Shallow, evaporating lagoons that left beds of salt. It's a world of crawling things, of survivors. The "ripple-marked" sandstones are the fossilized tracks of shallow, hesitant water. Life is starting over in the mud.

And then, above it, the Chinle Formation.

Ah, the Chinle. The great recovery. The rivers return, but they are different. They are jungle rivers. This is a continental basin, a swampy, wet world of lakes and massive river systems. The air is thick, humid. And for the first time... there are trees.

Great forests of them. This is the world that gives us the Petrified Forest. In my mind, I see a lush, green, violent world. This is the true dawn of the dinosaurs. The land is teeming. Giant amphibians lurk in the swamps. The first crocodile-like phytosaurs hunt in the rivers.

It is a world reborn. It is loud. It is green.

And it, too, is doomed.

The Wingate Formation, my perch for photography.

The Red Desert and the Second Fire (The Wingate)

I zoom in on the photograph. I am looking at the cliff face I was standing on. The sheer, magnificent, terrifying vertical wall of red.

The Wingate Sandstone.

The transition from the lush, swampy Chinle to the bone-dry Wingate is not a transition. It is an execution.

The rivers of the Chinle did not gently dry up. They vanished. The swamps did not slowly recede. They burned.

Look at the boundary. The End-Triassic Extinction. Another mass dying.

As the supercontinent of Pangea began to rip apart, the land screamed. The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) tore open—another volcanic event on a scale that dwarfs human comprehension. The air filled with fire and poison again.

The green world of the Chinle was incinerated.

And what was left?

Silence. And sand.

The Wingate Sandstone is the monument to this second apocalypse. It is a massive "erg." A desert. One of the largest sand seas the world has ever known. Those sheer, 400-foot cliffs are not cliffs. They are the petrified hearts of colossal sand dunes, dunes that marched across a dead continent.

The red color is the old iron, the blood of the Organ Rock, resurrected and scoured by a new, toxic wind. This is not the coastal, gentle desert of the White Rim. This is a continental monster. A Sahara on steroids. A planet of rust.

The Final Emptiness (Kayenta & Navajo)

My gaze, and my mind, drifts to the layers above my perch.

The desert relented, for a moment. The Kayenta Formation. A brief, fleeting whisper of water. Rivers and streams, thinner and more complex than before, snaked across the dunes. Life tried to come back. You find dinosaur tracks in the Kayenta. A final, desperate gasp of green.

It did not last.

The desert returned, and this time, it returned to end all things.

The Navajo Sandstone. The great white domes of Zion, the frozen waves of Arches. The largest sand desert in Earth's history. It buried the Kayenta's rivers. It buried the world. It is a world of nothing but wind and sand, a white, silent emptiness that dominates the Early Jurassic.

Navajo Sandstone, Rabbit Valley, East of Canyonlands NP at the Colorado/Utah border.

The Screen. The Room. The Seeing.

I click the mouse. The "Save As" dialogue box appears.

The digital file is processed. The daydream fades. I am back in my chair, in my dark room, in the year 2025.

My photograph has merit. The light is perfect. The shadows hold detail. But I am no longer editing a picture. I am a curator of apocalypses.

The photograph is a lie.

It shows a single, solid, permanent landscape. It shows a place. But there is no "place." There is only a stack of worlds. A library of ghosts. I am standing on the tomb of a jungle (the Chinle), which sits on the grave of a tidal flat (the Moenkopi), which sits on a memorial to a mass extinction (the Great Dying), which rests on a white ghost desert (the White Rim), which covers a world of red mud (the Organ Rock).

And here I am, the newest artifact. A man with a camera, a "fluvial system" of blood in his own veins, breathing an "eolian" wind, on a planet that is just catching its breath, waiting for the next layer.

I am editing. I am seeing. And I am humbled by the sheer, terrible, tragically beautiful weight of the stone.

Thanks for stopping by for a read!

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