By Ken Hubbard
After Spending four days in Las Vegas at the Photoshop World Conference, I wanted to get out of town and capture some images of one of my favorite spots to photograph, Utah's southwest region. My normal M.O. is to head towards Zion National Park's Springdale entrance. This time I wanted to check out a new spot, so I ended up driving to the town of Cedar City to check out a different part of Zion National Park known as Kolob Canyon as well as Cedar Breaks National Monument, which is very similar to Bryce Canyon National Park. Cedar City was only about a half an hour away from both locations making it the perfect spot to stay in. The great thing about these locations is that they are both much less crowded than many of the other well known spots in this area.
Many people have heard of Bryce Canyon National Park with it's amazing colors and towering Hoodoos jetting upward from the canyon floor. It's a spectacular place that everyone should visit if you are in the southern Utah region. However, there is another National Monument that is considered the baby brother to Bryce that many people overlook, and it's name is Cedar Breaks National Monument. Even if it is a little bit smaller in size than Bryce it is by no means a "baby brother", it is an amazingly beautiful and spectacular location, minus the crowds. To all of us photographers, less crowds means a much more enjoyable shooting experience. The images of the over 1600 year old Bristlecone Pine tree in this blog where taken along the Spectra Point trail.
You can really capture some stunning images of Bristlecone Pine trees, even though they look like they are dead, they are really very much alive. I guess I wouldn't look so good either if I was a few thousand years old! These trees offer up amazing textures and lines allowing for both close up images of their knobs and veins as well as wide angle images of its twisting turning branches. Even with all the yellows, oranges and reds glowing from the Canyon, I still wanted to present these images in black and white so the viewer can really concentrate on all the tones, cracks and crevices. I feel that color can sometimes take away from images like this by having the viewer looking at the color instead of the details. Trust me, as much as I like B&W, I still took plenty of color images of the canyon itself!
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