HDR Photography
Rolling hills (in this case, outside Park City, Utah) normally vanish into Rayleigh-scattered blue haze. (That was particularly the case this summer in Utah.) The magic of a red filter for black and white photography is to simultaneously reverse both the fading and the bluing effect. The result are landscapes like this that seem to go on “forever”.
Utah may be famous for its skiing (particularly in the region around Park City), but that makes for an enormous number of odd mountain features in the summer. For such unforgiving terrain, humans have made many changes to the area.
Another image from the flooded Bonneville Salt Flats.
So flat are the Bonneville Salt Flats that, during the winter months, the region will be covered uniformly by only about one inch of water. This layer is so thin that it can’t support large waves and surface disturbances, resulting in almost perfect reflection of the far-off hills and clouds.
Though English riding has much of its origin in hunts across the fields of rural estates, the sport is just as often trained indoors—particular at spacetime junctures like Salt Lake City on Christmas Eve.
Driving through the Bonneville Salt Flats, home of land speed records and long empty stretches, was a mirage-filled experience in the summer. Traversing the same alien landscape in the winter, following a series of major storms, is a brain-twisting exploration of optics: perfectly smooth surfaces (too shallow to support waves) make perfect clones of every hill and mountainside. This five-shot panorama captures the full scale of the space; I encourage you to click through to the full-size (32.1 MP) image on Flickr and see the detail for yourself.
