Goblin Valley Sunrise

I have to apologize for today’s blog post.  I have a couple of rather lengthy posts in the works, but things have not panned out as planned, so they’re not quite ready yet.  Instead, you get some thoughts I had after I’d sent Len an image in one of our photo swaps.  I decided to look at a series of images made of essentially the same subject over a 35-minute period in Goblin Valley State park.  I made other images in-between these, but I kept turning back to this subject because of the incredible light show it was providing.

You’ve seen the first image - I posted it as part of my blog posts from the trip - and I still think it’s the best of the bunch.

While I wish the clouds on the top of the frame had been a bit more interesting and less of a diagonal line across the top, it was still sufficiently early in the morning where the dark side of the moon was still visible.  

The same cannot be said about the moon nearly thirty minutes later at 6:54 am.  It’s now only a crescent.  And you can tell, I’ve moved down the trail probably a quarter mile or so, so the moon is no longer directly over the more interesting of the rock formations.  However, the cloud pattern is more interesting and the color pattern became more diverse. 

The image still retained the quiet beauty I was feeling just watching the sky transition from night to morning.

I decided to swap lenses to really get in closer to the view (returning back to those rock formations), and in five minutes the sky went from yellow to brilliant orange. 

Some of my later frames suggest that it had to do with some blocking clouds that are below the horizon, but I’m not so sure - it almost seemed like a sunset instead of a sunrise, which means dust in the air.  Anyway, the orange lasted for only a few minutes before the yellows and blue-purples returned and eventually daylight.

Aside from having the opportunity to make a beautiful image, or even multiple different images of the same subject, one of the things I appreciate the most from photography is that it has taught me to be patient in the landscape and to wait to see what unfolds before me.  Sometimes nothing does and you wish you’d spent that valuable time looking elsewhere.  But sometimes, even though you’re doing just that, past lessons remind me to keep looking back to where things are changing.  You never really know what you’re going to find.