Cody Redmon - Photoblog

I feel like I’ve been looking in on my own blog lately instead of running it.  I’ve been a bit under the weather lately, but am starting to feel human again.  Should have things back in order soon…

Today’s image is comprised of four separate frames, stitched together to create a rather large panorama.  Having completely forgotten I’d taken the series, I was anxious to work with them a bit to see what I could come up with.  I burned in the bright sky in the upper-left, popped the color and contrast about 5% and performed a noise reduction.  Although this scene gets photographed tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of times each year, not one of them is able to truly convey the scale of things.  Standing 2000 feet above the Colorado River below, it’s as breathtaking as any place I’ve ever been…even after three visits.  Taken during an extremely rainy October in 2006, the dark mood of the shot reflects the feeling of the day and the crazy adventures that were soon to follow.  Just like the walls of these vast canyons, the ’survival curve’ is a steep one…

**Update – I switched up my Featured RSS section in the sidebar to follow the work of an artist I met through the Fine Art Photoblog.  We recently brought on a few more talented folks, including our first female photographer – Dawn LeBlanc.  Of her many strengths, composition is one that speaks quite clearly for itself.  With subject matter ranging from fashion to food to figurines, I encourage you to visit her site, subscribe to her RSS feed, maybe leave her a comment on the image that speaks to you the most.  Among my favorites…

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I enjoyed going through my UT images the other day, enough so that I thought I’d do another post.  This image was taken in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument during March of 2006, a very chilly time of the year to visit the desert.  When one expects a scene to imply warmth and instead it produces the opposite, well, that’s the glory of nature.

Having been nearly six months since my last UT post, I decided to revisit the archives to see what I could dig up.  It’s pretty amazing how images ‘change’ over time while doing nothing more than sitting in storage.  Each viewing brings new perspective and ideas, new ways of approaching the same subject - as was the case for today’s photo.  I’m not sure how many times I’ve passed over it in the past, but several dozen I’m sure.  Taken October, 2006, in the ‘Island in the Sky’ region of Canyonlands National Park, this scene shows a vertical drop of about 1,100 feet, while just out of view to the right it drops an additional 1,200 - 1,400 feet.  My favorite road, the White Rim Road, is barely visible far below but follows a narrow course between these two extremes.  The Potash Ponds are visible in the upper-left, white against the landscape, covering several acres where they evaporate water used to gather the mineral.  To give a little better impression of the depth I saved this one out about thirty percent larger than normal.

A bit different from the landscapes I’ve been posting lately, here’s a minimalist image of cows being herded from one field to another near the base of the Crazy Mountains.  Though I’m a fan of dynamic scenes of nature, I also appreciate the simple details of rural life.

Island Park, ID, is one of the longest towns that I know of. Despite being labeled as a single location on any map you might read, a number of smaller villages comprise this incorporated community of 280 residents.  Spread across 33 heavily forested miles in the very toe of Idaho’s stubby, easterly boot, a portion of the town sits atop the Island Park Caldera, easily visible from space as one of the planet’s largest. The area-reservoir was developed just outside the caldera’s northern rim, pictured below in the calm of sunset with fall deciduous ablaze. I’ve not explored the area too much, but after nearly an hour of tracking tiny gravel roads on Google Earth, I’m already thinking about next spring…

Today I also want to send out a special thanks to Andrew Gibson, of Magical Places Fine Art and Fine Art Photoblog fame, for his continued support over the past nine months. He has written a number of pieces which highlighted my photography and I am most grateful for his backing. I’ve been featuring his RSS feed in my sidebar for the past few months with links to fantastic interviews and editorials – if you haven’t already, I encourage you to subscribe today!  And for fun, why not have a go with his latest: Fine Art Photographer Spotlight – Cody Redmon

**Site Updates - I’ve decided to start using ‘alt’ and caption tags for my images, and will be going back over time to update all previous posts with this info.  I also added a new site page called Cumulus which is a unique 3D approach to a tag cloud.  The one in my sidebar is near-useless in that you can’t easily distinguish the tags, but this new page (located permanently my header nav) should resolve the issue with an added touch of Adobe Flash.

Taken in the same region of the Caribou-Targhee National Forest as my recent Redemption in Color post, the undergrowth was so vibrant in this location that you could almost ‘hear’ the yellow.  I wish I would have been able to shoot this scene a bit wider, but several old pines prevented me from opening things up to the left of what you see here.  I’m pretty particular about fragmented elements jutting into the frame, but I’m wondering now what I could have come up with…once again proving that, as a photographer, if you consider a shot in any way, shape or form…shoot it!