Welcome to Colorful Utah - Landscape Photography of a Desert Eden

Enjoy beautiful landscape photography, including mountain and desert scenery, sunrise and sunset pictures, wildflower pictures, and other natural settings. All pictures are available as beautiful photographic prints.

Confessions of a Utah Landscape Photography Nut

Many of Utah's outdoor enthusiasts are transplants from other places. They come to Utah and experience the unique landscape for the first time, and are instantly mesmerized. They come from Europe, they come from the East Coast, and yes, they come from California, where the wilderness can be more densley populated than an L.A. suburb. They come, they see, they experience solitude for perhaps the first time, and they fall under the spell. They sell their belongings, buy a backpack and a nice camera, disappear into the landscape, and some of them never come back.

Kum ba ya, so much for them. My journey of discovering Utah landscape photography is not nearly so dramatic, but the end result, the passion, is the same. The process started early on in my life, before I had developed an appreciation for Utah's wilderness or ever considered landscape photography.

My nuttiness for Utah landscape photography sprouted when I was only an acorn under the proverbial tree. My father planted the seed, but it wasn't until my epiphany that the desert fever set in. My earliest childhood memories of experiencing the wonder of the Utah landscape are of Dad dragging me off to some corner of the desert and forcing me on a death march up a lonely trail of barren sandstone slickrock, under the intense heat of a baking Utah afternoon. Like a member of the chain gang, I dragged my poor, whining, parched little-boy body up the rock. I always enjoyed whatever landmark was at the destination, but the journey was arduous, the desert landscape lifeless.

Then one day all that changed. I remember the epiphany vividly. We were hiking through Devil's Garden in Arches National Park. The trail was long for short legs, and the few hundred feet of elevation gain had defeated my will. Another death march, up over the worn sandy path, over sandy rock. I hardly noticed the beauty of the towering sandstone fins on either side of me. The majesty of seeing Landscape Arch, the world's biggest, along with Dad's stunning revelation that a whole football field would fit inside that hole in the rock, faded quickly as the hike turned into a mental battle that I was losing.

Suddenly, the trail left the sand and sage and followed several cairns up onto the top of one of the sandstone fins we had been following. For the first time on the hike, I could see down over the expanse of fractured earth, dotted with pinyon pines and junipers. Each crevasse, full of shadow, held a mystery. The trail continued along the fin and within a minute or so, the ground dropped off on both sides of the fin and I felt like I was on a boardwalk in the sky. It suddenly became apparent to me that treating this hike casually could result in a misstep which might send me plunging 100 feet to my death. This "death factor" kicked into gear certain emotions and physical sensations which I do not remeber experiencing before that time in my life. All at once, Dad had an addict on his hands. Energy rushed to my legs, and with my heart pumping and my mind racing, distance and elevation became non-factors. Desert fever had set in. The journey was more captivating than the destination. Another Utah landscape nut was born.

When one falls in love with the Utah landscape, it is a natural next step to fall in love with Utah landscape photography. The thrill of exploration and the "death factor" are ever-present in the desert canyons, badlands, and plateaus that the amazing Utal landscape offers. They are also abundant in the hundreds of miles of trails through Utah's majestic rocky mountains. But underlying and enhancing all these fun-factors is the remarkable, subtle, fragile beauty of the landscape--the colors of Utah.

My early attempts at Utah landscape photography were frustrating. As a kid, I only had a cheap camera, and I didn't understand photographic techniques. Most of my pictures turned out washed out or dark, the brilliant, earthy oranges and reds transformed into a murky brown when they came back from the developer. Despite my inexperience and frequent frustration, the colorful Utah landscape is at times so amazing (especially at sunrise and sunset) that I occasionally produced some great pictures in spite of myself.

After several years I had accumulated a small collection of landscape photos I was proud of. I discovered a use for these in my high school art classes, where I not only learned color theory and composition, I painted colorful landscapes from my picture stock as often as the assignments would allow. My Advanced Placement Art Portfolio consisted mostly of paintings and drawings that documented my love affair with the deserts of Utah.

During my college and early professional years, I had a hard time finding dedicated time to paint, and I started itching for another creative outlet to express the desert fever that still bound me to the wilderness. I discovered that outlet in landscape photography.

I remember my first time back to Bryce Canyon National Park as a camera-savvy photographer thinking to myself, "This is amazing! I can point the camera randomly in any direction and get a great picture!" Of course, I was wrong--but barely wrong. The colorful Utah landscape is so full of surprises, subtlety, and drama that there are literally landscape photography opportunities almost everywhere. It can be frustrating at times when the limited scope of the camera lens simply does not capture the grandeur of the scene that my eyes are taking in. Panoramic landscape photography can be a solution to this problem, and the panoramic photography collection on this site illustrates some of my work in this format, and contains most of my personal favorites.

The colorful Utah landscape is as diverse as any place on earth. The title of this site, Colorful Utah -- Landscape Photography of a Desert Eden, is fitting both to describe the lush green canyons of Utah's mountains as well as the parched, dry mesas and canyons of Utah's deserts. When I am in American Fork canyon on a cool summer morning, surrounded by intensely green quaking aspens whose leaves are fluttering in the breeze, I can't think of a better word than Eden to describe the place. When I return in the fall to see the aspens turn gold and the red maples spring out of hiding, the phrase Eden on steroids is the only appropriate description. But to restrict my definition of Utah's Eden landscape to the garden-like forests of aspen and fern would be to overlook perhaps Utah's most unique and precious asset--it's deserts.

The copious collection of desert landscape photography I have included on this site is merely a small sampling of the wonder, the serenity, the majesty, and the utter strangeness of what the Utah desert landscape offers. There is something so sublime about the desert in motion--the almost imperceptible activity of the many critters that claim the desert as their home; the shadow of a raven as it travels along barren sand, then sharply up and over a sandstone wall, disappearing and then reappearing out of the shadow of the wall; the invisible yet powerful forces of wind and ice and water as they sculpt and destroy the living rock that gives the landscape shape and such vivid color. Colorful Utah is a landscape photographer's dream. There is no shortage of beauty and wonder here in the wilderness, absorbed in the landscape.

Don't get me wrong; I love people, civilized society and fine culture (having spent three years myself singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir). However, there is too much in our modern lifestyle that separates us from the wild. Where I live, the sound of crickets is drowned out by the hum of central air conditioners. Stars are only dimly seen through the yellow glow of the city. Most of the natural, outdoor air that I breathe is first funneled and filtered. Indoor plumbing is ubiquitous. What have we come to as a society?

We need an escape. We need to get out more. All too often I am stuck in a nice, climate-controlled building with too many modern amenities. Luckily for me, living in the shadows of the Wasatch mountain range in Utah, whether I am at home or at my office, escape to nature is a quick five-minute drive, or fifteen minute bike ride, to the local canyon. But even if I can make it to the canyon, duty usually calls me back out again a few hours later. The pleasant solitary liberation of hearing nothing but the breeze, seeing nothing but open country, and having nothing to do but enjoy it all is elusive. That's another reason why I got involved in landscape photography. We all need a way to live outside the cramped boxes that the humdrum of life confines us to. There is a wild, beautiful world out there to see. We need a way to mobilize our most pleasant memories and fire our fantasies of future escape to the landscape.

Just above my desk, I have an oversized picture of Yellowstone's gorgeous Hayden Valley (not in Utah, I know, I know. But just next door). The sun is low in the evening sky, warming my back against the cool dusk air. The pale blue sky is reflected in the gentle flow of the Yellowstone River. The grass is a lush, dark blue in the shadows and a fiery gold where the long, stretched out sunrays touch the slender, seeded stalks that shiver in the breeze. Just out of the frame, a little to the right, is a large herd of American Bison, snorting, scuffing the dirt with their hoofs, and rolling in the dust, creating golden, shimmering clouds. If you listen carefully, you can hear them echoing from across the valley. Overhead, a hawk sails effortlessly over the evening air. No, looking at a picture is not the same as being there in person, but it is absolutely the next best thing. I'm there in spirit now. You come too, and see for yourself.