Vics Blog

Waves of Stone

The desert southwest of the United States is one of the most beautifully wild places on the planet to photograph. Utah’s Canyon Lands and Arches National Parks, with their imposing read sandstone cliffs, are fascinating  places to shoot incredible landscapes. Bryce and Zion National Parks are equally magnificent and offer grand vistas of unbelievably huge rock formations. Of course, there’s Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Canyon De Chelly, Saguaro National Park, Monument Valley and countless photo treasure sites everywhere you turn. Sunrises and sunsets, with their golden hues reflected on towering, rocky cathedrals are breath taking. It’s as if Mother Nature designed a place that was perfect for great experiences and taking pictures.

     I could go on and on about all of the places I’ve been privileged to see, but my favorites are the hidden slot canyons that abound in the canyon country of Arizona and Utah.  The Grand Canyon is a mile deep and over sixteen miles across in contrast to slot canyon walls that are only a few feet apart and are so enclosed that sunlight rarely reaches their depths.  They have names like Buckskin Gulch, Baptist Draw, Lick Wash, and Antelope Canyon. For me, they can give a very intimate experience, and are much different from the overwhelming feelings I get when I see boundless landscapes. They have been sculpted over millenia by roaring wind and flash floods and their walls look like gentle   waves engraved in stone.  Pastel colors of yellow, pink, mauve; red and crimson are sometimes illuminated by piercing shafts of light that penetrate the abyss from the desert above.  Take your tripod and shoot short time exposures.

     Last spring, while motoring down a remote road in southern Utah, I ran into some folks that told me of a beautiful little slot canyon at the end of a sandy wash fifteen miles ahead.  I followed their directions and after some wash board driving, parked the Xterra, grabbed my gear, and started hiking two miles through a narrowing ravine that stopped abruptly at the portal. With three hundred foot sandstone walls towering above me, I could see that countless floods had washed through the entrance of the five foot wide passage and I got worried.

     Thunderstorms had plagued me all day and now they gathered in all directions. I had heard of people being swept to their deaths in such places and sometimes the torrents came from miles away. What to do? I started into the canyon which constricted quickly and dropped ten feet over large boulders which were obviously the remains of a waterfall. That was all I needed to see, and trusting my intuition, it convinced me to turn around and get the heck out of there. I snapped a few pictures but a blinding flash of lightning and rolling waves of thunder hastened my retreat and I high tailed it back towards the road as fast as I could.  Forty five minutes later, opening the door and quickly throwing my pack inside the truck, the heavens let loose and it rained buckets for an hour.

     One of the great places to improve your wildlife and landscape photography is Snowy Range, Wyoming.  Just a short distance from Fort Collins, Colorado or Cheyenne, Wyoming, the high peaks of the Medicine Bow Range are reflected in many of the small alpine lakes that dot the region. The best time to photograph is early morning when the sun highlights the peaks and reflects on still water.  July through September are spectacular and are great times to take pictures, although alpine wildflowers abound in the middle of summer and learning to take images of them is a workshop I teach.  After a few hours of instruction, my students learn to capture pictures like the pros. Students need to layer their clothing as mornings and evening can be very cool and midday’s can be hot. Because of the high altitude it’s also advisable to wear sunscreen to keep from burning. Colorado and the West offer some of the greatest wildlife and scenery opportunities for photography in the world. Snowy Range is right at the top of the list and is virtually missed by most.

     Last week I conducted one of my one on one digital photography workshops in Fort Collins, Colorado.  My student and I spent ten hours shooting images of Osprey, Great Horned Owls and Red Fox. One of the things that I have found I can really help photographers with is learning the specifics of their cameras. How to focus properly, how to set up quickly for great wildlife shots and how to capture great detail.  I also help with Adobe Photoshop ideas and field photo instruction detailing balance, color and composition.  I feel that workshops with more than three or four students lose some of the quality time I can spend helping them individually so I prefer to keep sessions small. We had a very successful day and I know my student learned a lot. His comment was it was like “Trying to take a drink through a firehose”.

A few weeks ago I was photographing my good friend Andy Leslie fly fishing on the Laramie River north of Chambers Lake which in up near the top of Cameron Pass. For those who haven’t been there, it’s a beautiful little stream that quietly flows through hay and cattle country and eventually meanders into Wyoming at the eastern edge of the Snowy Range and through the city of Laramie.  I love to take pictures of sportsmen including hunters, kayakers and fisherman and in doing so it keeps my skills sharp for those days when a big moose or elk comes around and I have to work fast.  Trying to capture a fly line as it whips back and forth through the air or shooting images of hunting buddies as they sit around an evening campfire can be just as enjoyable as any hike  through the woods looking for wildlife.

     Andy had called me about a week before and asked if I’d like to tag along with him and a couple of buddies as they snow shooed along the river trying to bag some big rainbow and brown trout.  Now I’ve heard a lot of fish stories in my day, but when he talked about twenty three inch monsters that weighed upwards of seven pounds on that river I had to say I was a bit sceptical. The real draw though, was being able to capture fishermen on snowshoes  and so it didn’t take me more than a couple of seconds to say “yes”.

     After driving a couple of hours into weather that got worse by the mile, we arrived at the Rawah ranch and strapped on our all weather , all terrain, four wheel drive snow shoes and began the short trek to the river.  I hadn’t done such a thing in forty years and being just a tad on the out of shape side, I could tell this was going to be an undertaking. It was drizzling sleet and rain which causes snow to become rotten. Rotten snow doesn’t support people on snowshoes very well and needless to say that about every twenty steps or so I managed to sink down about eighteen inches and fall over.  Now that’s not so bad, but trying to get up is worse because when you put your hands down and try and push yourself up, they sink too.  Luckily, everyone took pity on me and every so often they’d come by and lend a helping hand. It wasn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be and ended up being a great adventure.

I did manage to take a lot of pictures during the five hours of wallowing in quick sand snow and the fishing was more spectacular than Andy  said it would be.  Every few minutes, as they drifted nymphs through deep, dark pools of ice cold water, they would hook one of those whopping brutes and after a great fight land him in the net.  The action was fast and furious and the breathtaking scenery only added to the images we got.  Thank you Andy.

A few weeks ago I was on Remount road near Cheyenne trying to photograph antelope. That day, the only pronghorn I was seeing were little bucks and does which hunting magazines usually don’t publish. I tried to put the sneak on a few anyway but they saw me first and were off to the next county in a blink. As the day past, my Quaker Chewy bars, 100 calories apiece, just weren’t filling me up and the water in my pack was getting hot. I was thinking it was going to be one of those bust days that I encounter sometimes while photographing wildlife and I needed to go home.
I had started on a diet a couple of months before trying to shed a few pounds that had accumulated during the past twenty years. I noticed that as I stalked the antelope , my pants seemed a little loose around the waist so I cinched up my belt and kept up the hunt. Out to the West, as I continued my quest, I noticed that a big thunderstorm was starting to gather and was moving in my direction in a hurry. I think the animals knew it too and they disappeared.
On Remount road there are some really interesting rock formations that appear out of nowhere on the prairie and seeing that the wildlife was gone I decided it might be time to switch tactics and take a few landscape pictures of them against the approaching storm. I had to drive about two miles toward the darkening clouds and as I arrived I thought I would have about ten minutes to compose a couple of shots before the rain let loose. I was trying to find a unique angle that could really capture the moment and was about 100 yards from my truck when a bolt of lightening struck a tree about a quarter of a mile away. Whoa I thought, I better be like one of those antelope and get the heck out of here in a hurry.
I put the Canon 7D around my neck and started for the vehicle knowing that one of those bolts was about to get me. At about 25 yards, at a dead run, you can imagine what happened next. There, in the middle of the Wyoming prairie, trying to outrun a thunderstorm , my pants fell to my ankles in about half a second. I was terrified and laughing my head off at the same time and all I could think about was the song from American Idle “Pants on the Ground”. I just hope the antelope got a good laugh too. My name is Vic Schendel, wildlife and nature photographer from Fort Collins. In this column I’ll try to share my adventures and give you some hints on taking good pictures. My tip for this week…..good fitting clothes are a must and always be careful of the weather.

I was taking pictures of Common Mergansers today when it was 9 degrees out.

Then in the Big Thompson Canyon it was a touch warmer, twelve degrees, when I shot a stand of Ponderosa Pines in the snow.