It’s been a few years since I’ve driven the White Rim Trail. I’ve been busy with kid, wife, wedding photography, and portrait photography. It’s the tiny dirt road you can see winding its way around the closer edge of the Soda Springs Canyon. The road itself is about 100 miles long. People challenge themselves to mountain bike it in one day. I’m sure nowadays people are gravel riding it as well.

Seeing this picture makes me want to go do it again in the Tacoma. Since my wife, Mary, is into gravel bike riding it might work out for her to ride and me be the Sherpa. I just now texted her the idea. Could be fun.

The day I shot this was unspectacular. This looks spectacular because I did a couple Lightroom adjustments. The adjustments weren’t sliding the saturation button all the way over. I only have a +5 or +7 on saturation. It was all about contrast adjusting. The big contrast was slid over to about +6. It’s all about the haze and sharpening. Each was moved over to about +7-10. Then I went into the red and moved the saturation over about +1 and the blue with about +1. Warmed it up a tiny bit. Haven’t done any dodging and burning.

Here’s a truism I’ve learned from shooting about a million pictures in the last 30 years: the best pictures don’t require a ton of work to make or to adjust afterwards. When doing portraits I’ll give up and move on to the next idea if it takes even a slight bit too much work. The picture will have problems. I won’t even use it. None of the pictures on that page required much work. The same is true for landscape photography. When I used to shoot Fuji Velvia I always had to put a Singh Ray Galen Rowell Graduated Neutral Density filter in front of the lens to make the picture useable. Any picture requiring multiple filters at different angles ever once came out right. Any portrait idea trying to use special grid lighting, putting Christmas lights in front of the lens for the blurry light framing effect, or trying to frame a person, family, or couple inside a special window, tree branch, or whatever rarely looks good. Yes, I’ll try them, but they usually don’t work.

I was just sitting on a rock up above the parking area for this picture. Nothing fancy. Me sitting on my little blue square yoga mat pad, a tripod, and a couple lenses looking out over the canyon.