Radeka Photography

Standing Rocks

Land Of Standing Rocks, 1988.
Canyonlands National Park, Utah

     Along the rough, sixty-mile jeep road which enters the dramatic and remote Maze District of Utah's Canyonlands National Park, I noticed that an interesting curved cloud mass was slowly moving to the east, stretching high above an area that is called the "Land Of Standing Rocks" on topographic maps. Seeing that the coarsely textured buttes presented an interesting grand landscape image, accentuated by the interesting cloud formations which were moving into place, I quickly stopped the vehicle, set up my 4x5, applied a deep yellow-orange filter and took this shot only seconds before a jet trail appeared right through the sky of this image. The negative was, however, considerably over-exposed. I later reduced the negative slightly in Farmer's Reducer which brought the values to very printable densities. This print is one of my more difficult prints to make, requiring a number of masks including shadow, SCIM, and my own mask technique which I call a Fog Mask. This mask allows me to control the values in the sky areas of this print, smoothing out uneven values while at the same time reducing the appearance of grain in the sky. To me this image is symbolic of our Great American West with it's grand vistas, exciting skies and remote wilderness.

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