We drove over to Utah and Arizona over the 4th of July week, spending 5 days in the desert visiting parks, painting, and taking photos.
i uploaded photos to a set of albums a little over a week of getting back, which for me is an achievement in itself! A few things helped to keep the 1,248 pictures I took over the course of the week organized -
1. Upload pictures to Lightroom daily. It only takes a couple of minutes, and you can do some quick shares for family and friends. A quick review also helped me learn from mistakes made during the day, and helped prep for the next day.
2. Rate images early and often - discarding the blurry or boring images (not deleting, just using the "reject" flag in Lightroom) helped scale down how many images I needed to process to a much more manageable number.
Magical Moab
Driving into Moab from Denver, we were stunned by the scenic change as Utah's high desert came into view. We then took the scenic route down state highway UT-128, which forced us to drive slower at ~45MPH. While it’s inaccurate to claim the other routes aren’t “scenic”, we were rewarded almost immediately when we spotted a number of desert cottontail rabbits crossing the road. I fished out the camera from behind the drivers seat, and took a few shots that looked good on the camera screen. Looking at them on the big screen however, they were almost all unusable due to how shaky it was! I forgot a cardinal rule of not letting the shutter speed be more than the 1 over the focal length of the zoom lens - now learnt the hard way. Got one good pic of the rabbit in flight, though.
We also came across a hawk (or eagle?), a number of prairie dogs, and a pronghorn. The pronghorn posed really nicely, framed between the hill it was standing on and the sky behind it.
The biggest surpirse was the road winding along the Colorado river, creating canyons lined with hoodoos. At sunset, the canyon took on an unearthly glow, with hoodoos in the distance looking like a golden, inaccessible, city in the distance - El Dorado, maybe?
Up Next
I need to write more on the rest of the trip, but publishing this for now to get the photos out there.
1. Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, driving up to Bryce Canyon via UT-12 and Escalante.
2. Painting and bird-watching in Bryce Canyon National Park, an instagram-worthy photoshoot at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park and driving up to Page, Arizona on the 4th of July
3. Antelope Canyon and painting in the golden hour at Monument Valley.
