Goblins
Things always take longer than you think. Well, at least for me. So my progress on going through 2025 images for a website update has been . . . slow. So much so that I decided I needed a break and got back to the images from my 2024 trip with Len.
It may have been a leftover from the brain freeze I had from grinding through 2025 images, but I worked my way through several days of the 2024 trip without seeing anything I wanted to work on. That was until I returned to one of our standard photo locations - Goblin Valley State Park. It’s one of the gems of the wonderful Utah state park system and always seems to have something to offer a photographer.
As with other images from this series, it was when I started to think about how images would look in black and white that I realized I had something new to work with. Detailed compositions such as these, where precise framing matters a lot, are something I carry from my view camera days and, even without the front and rear movements, still enjoy doing with a digital camera. One of the things I forget though, again a carry over from the view camera days, is that at the time, I would have been shooting in black and white, so the impressions of the form render quite differently when seen tonally in black and white than when seen in color. I then had quite a bit to explore and work with.
The first image is really very simple. It consists solely of three goblins and the spaces created between them. Three brighter masses on the upper part of the image, with the much darker supporting masses, and distinct near-black passages created between them, on the bottom.
For me, there’s nothing really profound about these types of images. I’m searching for something that is pleasing to the eye, and offers a bit of curiosity for the mind. As Saint Ansel said, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” I think with these types of detailed shots more so than many others, either the viewer brings a whole lot to the image, or doesn’t. Really, that’s true with every image - it either connects with you or it doesn’t. All that matters (for me at least) is that it does something for me when I photograph the image, and when I work on it. The rest is up to you.
The second image I opted for is a bit more complex, spatially at least. In many ways, I enjoy the complex spatial relationships between the goblins, the lighting and the sense of depth in this image more than the one above. However, the image is tripped up by the physics of optics and depth-of-field. I can’t quite fully embrace the increasing loss of focus in the image as you look deeper and deeper into the spaces between the interlocking goblins.
It’s unfortunate. But that’s the way it is sometimes. Still, I see what I was trying to capture, and I can still appreciate it from the image.
The last one I worked on took the opposite approach. I took the one image that I originally worked on as a black and white image, and returned to its color original to see if I could make it work. I’m actually quite pleased with it. It certainly has that complexity of interlocking goblins and sense of space from the image above, but given I’m a bit farther away and using a wider angle lens (which allows for a deeper depth of field), it doesn’t suffer from the flaws of the image above.
Yes, it’s not as clean as the image immediately above (and certainly not the first image), it still shares that sense of light, form and space with the earlier images. But to me, this image borders on a photograph of the landscape. A detail of a land scape for sure, but a landscape nonetheless, unlike the first two which were definite detail images.
Well, those are my photographic ramblings for this week. If you ever drive through Utah, I highly recommend a stop at Goblin Valley State Park. You won’t be disappointed.