Photo of the Week, Daylight Goblins
Timing was on my side this day. We were driving through Utah as a family in spring 2019 during our second desert southwest campervan trip. Well before this trip our kids asked casually one evening at the dinner table why we hadn't gone to Disneyland yet. Our response is that we, like the vast majority of people, have constraints of time and money. We chose trips like our campervan adventure because it seemed more our style. Then we asked them if they had to choose which would they pick. The answer... they both said the campervan trip. We had so much fun doing it once, and with a lot to still see in the southwest, we decided to do a second one. This was one of the stops on the second trip. It was unplanned.
If I recall correctly I was looking at the map, digital of course, while driving near by on our way to our next destination which I believe was Moab. I noticed Goblin Valley State Park was a short drive off the road and felt it was worth the time to stop. I had always heard it can be a crowded place. While there were other visitors it wasn't that busy.
What did surprise me most was that you can walk out in the field of hoodoos. I expected some viewing points from the distance but instead I was greeted with the ability to wander around which was refreshing compared to many places today where access is going in the limiting direction. I will say though that some folks were climbing and jumping on hoodoos that seemed like it wasn't in the hoodoos best interest. Yet nothing I could see limited park visitors from doing this. We used our time to wander and wonder in the large field of hoodoos which was fun to see how they are all different in size and shape with the only similarity being color.
Yet before we did any wandering around I sprang into photo action once we arrived. The dappled partly cloudy skies were perfect and I knew it wouldn't last long, if I would even be quick enough to take a photo of what I was seeing. I snapped some photos from this vantage point close to the car and then more casually made our way down into the "bowl" of hoodoos.
What processing was involved with the photo you seen above? I am glad you asked. Pretty minimal. At a high level there was four masks in Adobe Camera Raw (Lightroom for most folks). The masking was to push the highlights and shadows, darkening the darks and lightening the lights. I also converted it to black and white in ACR. I don't always do this, sometimes it's in Photoshop but in this case I was able to get very close to what I was after. Then in Photoshop it was a few layers of fine tuning with some minor dodging in places that weren't quite bright enough along with mid-tones luminosity mask for additional contrast.
As it sometimes is for me, years went by before I processed it. This spring I guess was the timing for it to "hatch" from it's egg into life as a photo to share in my portfolio. As a comparison, above is another photo I took less than 1 minute before the one I processed in black and white. You can see how much different the light is between the two, processing aside. While it would have made a fine black and white photo I chose the photo you see in black and white here in this post as it has a nice sandwich layer look that makes for a more dramatic image. The brighter foreground and sky are the bread and the dark shadows the filling. Now it's time to go get something to eat.
