Brain Rock Garden

Over the past 9 days, I travelled to the Desert Southwest on a search for new images from the Colorado Plateau and the Arizona Desert. Late March is a wonderful time to shoot in the Sonora and high desert slick rock country of Northern Arizona and southern Utah. I started out my trip by meeting up with legendary Arizona Highways Photographer George Stocking. After stocking up and fueling up, we headed north from Phoenix onto the Navajo Reservation.
Many of the images you will see are from some secret spots and sensitive areas in and around the reservation. For that reason, I will not be giving specific location names, but rather titles to the images.


I would like to start out with an image I created while shooting deep in the Paria Plateau back country. This location of brain rock and sculpted multi colored slick rock is in my humble opinion one of the most amazing locations I have traveled to in over 15 years of shooting the landscape. I started the day out waking up at 3:30am. In the dark gloom of night, I set low to a campfire to keep warm and thought about the day before while I was scouting out the location. I knew the sun would touch the brain rock in the upper basin of this place, and so this is where I headed for first light. The sky was clear and free of clouds. Not always the best situation, but we can only work with what mother nature affords! i set out to find a section of brain rock with a lone pine tree growing in the shallow sand. As the sun rose just a bit over the horizon it began to skim the rock face and paint it with soft and warm morning light.


I choose a composition that showed the absurdity of the lone pine clinging to life in such a barren landscape. In order to get the right perspective for this image, i had to climb up a steep embankment of brain rock. This was very important in order to show the right perspective of the tree nestled into the grove of solid stone. The use of a moderate telephoto lens allowed me to compress the perspective and effectively squish the lone tree in a maze of brain rock.


Best of light,

Joe