Chris Otte

Places & Things: On Location: Arizona

In March of 2005, I spent ten days photographing the wonderful Arizona landscape. Filled with interesting shapes and textures and massive in scale, it must be seen in person to truly appreciate.

While I was photographing Horseshoe Bend, my eye was drawn to this scene. Stone, naturally sculpted over many years by its creator: the weather, present in the background.
   
I photographed this old tree in Arizona in March of 2005, not long after a flood had passed through this area. I was awestruck by this tree’s resilience and how it thrived with so much of its root structure exposed, clinging to the bank of the river shown in the background.
   
Like water over a fall, the light felt as though it was spilling down inside this canyon wall in this abstract composition. The sharp contrast and curves created by light raking across the striations in the rock, give this static subject a sense of movement.
     
  
It can be difficult to capture a unique composition of a subject that is photographed frequently. Arriving very late in the day at Monument Valley, the light was just about to slip away. I was overwhelmed by the scale of these immense landscape features, which are in fact, several hundred yards away. Tilting the camera down to capture the shrub in the foreground, my eye is lead up to the mittens. My hope was to convey the massive scale, (so alien to me) of this great western landscape.
   
To convey the scale of a landscape is sometimes hard to do with a photograph. As I walked toward the peaks in the background, they didn’t seem to move at all. It was then that I realized this was going to be a very long walk. Tilting my camera down and placing it very close to the ground, the river bed in the foreground is captured while keeping the peaks in the background in sharp focus. My hope was to convey the great extent of this wonderful scene, from inches in front of my tripod legs to miles away.
   
I found this composition (the left side of Horseshoe Bend) appealing as the gentle curve of the river meanders through the frame, some 700 feet below the rim of the canyon.
     
  
The broken tree in the foreground serves as a reminder that the canyon itself is just as fragile and speaks to the need for all of us to keep and preserve this great place for generations to come.
   
This magnificent site is in Page, Arizona. At nearly a mile wide and over 700 feet deep, this bend in the Colorado River is truly a sight to behold.
   
While searching for a subject, in what was a rather bleak landscape, I noticed my travel companion, fellow photographer and friend, Dan Brown, off in the distance composing a shot. The combination of a great sky, wonderfully textured ground and Dan's scale in this scene struck me. It was the embodiment of enjoying the simple pleasure of solitude in a vast, quiet landscape.
     
  
Darting around, more like large insects than birds, humming birds can be a challenge to photograph. Fortunately, they are rather still while they feed, as was this bird when I made this exposure. Frozen in time, the delicate structure of the head and body feathers, depicted in crisp detail, are offset by the soft pink blossoms on the right, giving us an extended glimpse into the lives of these amazing little birds.
   
A long stretch of highway extends into a deep blue sky in the vast, open landscape of Arizona.