Craig Stocks Arts Blog

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days in the Tampa / St. Petersburg area in Florida. That gave me a chance to visit the pier in Fort De Soto Park at sunset. I’ve been here a few times before and always find it fascinating. You may recall another photo of the Fort De Soto Pier that I posted some time ago.

The beach and pier are a great location for sunset photography. For the photo above, I was standing on a boardwalk that extends from the parking lot to the beach, so I didn’t need to go tromping through the sea oats to get a good vantage point. As you can see, the boardwalk is well positioned to include the sea oats and small dunes as foreground elements while the sun is setting behind the pier. The result is several layers of interesting elements – dunes, sea oats, beach, water, pier and clouds.

Here’s another photo from the Alabama Hills area on Christmas morning. This rock formation is known as the Mobius Arch and it shows up in lots of places. You can see a short video about the arch here.

You may have never heard of the Alabama Hills, but I’m sure you’ve seen it in movies and TV commercials. I’ve seen a number of locations where the old westerns were filmed, such as the Iverson Ranch where the Lone Ranger rock is located, and Vasquez Rocks, but the Alabama Hills area is unique because it is a much larger area. The rock formations at the Iverson Ranch covered several acres, where the Alabama Hills area covers several square miles. It’s easy to see why it was such a popular location.

Since I grew up in the Midwest, my perception of the old, Wild West was formed by the movies and TV shows I watched as a boy. It seems like every western was filmed in and around these rock formations, so I thought the entire West looked like that. The reality is that there are just a few isolated areas with rock formations, and most of the West is flat, high desert. The rock formations make a dramatic setting, but they’re not really typical of the area.

This photo was taken Christmas morning at the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California. Numerous movies and TV shows were filmed there. Most recently it’s featured in Subaru commercials where the car is lost among the rock formations. Of course, most of the movies were westerns, and the rock formations bring back my childhood memories of pretending to be a cowboy in the old west. When I look at this scene I can sure imagine “bad guys” hiding behind the rocks. Or, maybe I’m the bad guy using the rocks as my hideout. Either way, it’s easy to imagine yourself inside the image.

This is also a good example of why landscape photographers like sunrise and sunset. Since there weren’t any clouds that morning, the sunrise wasn’t very spectacular. But once the sun was up, its low angle created lots of texture in the landscape, and there’s a great deal of warm/cool color contrast between the shadows and highlights. Where the sun is shining the landscape is turned a bright red-gold color while the shadows take their color from the bright blue sky. The resulting color contrast helps add depth and interest to the scene.