Landscape Photography Magazine

While on location and heading to your chosen spot, take time every now and again to look back at the direction you have come from. You never know what you might see from a different angle. Ian Plant has the story

Rock is the very stuff of the earth; its binding material gives it enough heft to enable the amount of gravity that leaves us somewhere comfortably between the extremes of not being able to stand and spinning off into space. This mass also produces intense pressure and heat in the planet’s core, spawning magma that moves the crust of the earth, thrusting ramparts of stone high into the sky.  Water is the most destructive force in nature; over time carving deep canyons, beating down mountains, and reducing even solid granite to dust. Light is life, energy from the ancient collapse of a hydrogen molecular cloud (forming the sun), providing sustenance to plants and digital camera sensors alike. These three forces engage in a slow dance over the millennia, sometimes acting in concert, sometimes in conflict, sometimes destroying, and sometimes building. The steps are complex, and the tempo may not be apparent to those who do not have the luxury of watching for several million years. Molten rock raises high mountains, light sustains plants which break down the rocks, water carves the rocks and washes sediment away to a distant ocean delta, the sediment is buried and turns eventually to sandstone, tectonic pressures raise the sandstone rocks, water carves a mighty chasm over the eons, and light follows a winding path to the canyon floor, kindling the rocks with an other-worldly glow.

The world famous Virgin River Narrows of Zion National Park is one of my favorite places to photograph, with good reason; essentially it is the mother of all slot canyons. When deep inside the Narrows you are…