550 - Monument Rocks
I’M ON MY WAY TO THE EAST COAST FOR FALL COLORS.
Finally. It’s been a long couple weeks in Denver saving up cash for the road. A dark, empty void was beginning to spread in my heart. And I filled that void with dreamy portrait shoots.
Mainly because I’ve shot every landscape that’s even remotely interesting within 50 miles of the Denver metro area. If you want to check out these portrait adventures, they’re here:
But please note, I didn’t do full write-ups for these sessions because they’re just portraits. But the photos are all there. Documented for your viewing pleasure.
ANYWAY. Back to the topic at hand. I needed to get out to the East Coast. And I wasn’t not about to travel across the entire continental United States without stopping for a single photo.
Which leads me to today’s adventure- Monument Rocks. The strangest landscape in all of Kansas.
A bold claim, yes. But I’ve started to see myself as a top rising landscape photographer in Kansas, namely because not a single one exists. So yes, I’m personally claiming it as the most out-of-pocket scene in all of Kansas.
You pull up to this place after driving through cornfields for hours, and suddenly your eyes are taken back by beauty. To quote the late Wizard of Oz, “If we walk far enough, said Dorothy, I am sure sometime we will come to some place.”
And that place is a magnificent clay rock field that look like something out of New Mexico’s badlands.
Here’s a photo there, to get you warmed up:
“Cloudy Bloom”
Taken with Sony a7rIV + Sony 24-105mm f/4 G
[ISO 1250 ~ 24mm ~ f/7.1 ~ 1/2000s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Wild. Absolutely wild.
Now I must give a full disclaimer about the clouds in that photo. In reality, they are about 300 feet to the left of this scene. But I took a photo of them and positioned them over these rocks in Photoshop. Because symmetry.
I also want to give a disclaimer that I will never use AI in my work. All my photos contain pixels taken from my camera. Be it from one, two, or twenty photos, every photo is a scrapbook of my content. No one else's. OK? OK. And the same can be said for these blog posts that I sit down and write by hand. IT’S ALL ME, FOLKS.
Needed to be said with all the AI madness going on now. Sheesh.
Alright. Now that you have a general idea of what this place is like, let’s get a little closer to the action. This thing, for example, was buzzing around the flowers at 100mph:
“Red Pollen”
Taken with Sony a7rIV + Sony 24-105mm f/4 G
[ISO 1250 ~ 105mm ~ f/4 ~ 1/2000s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
What the hell is that? It’s like a moth hummingbird hybrid with war paint.
EDIT: I asked some bug freaks on Reddit and apparently it’s a White-lined Sphinx, also known as Hyles lineata. It comes from the moth family, and starts out life as a caterpillar. It’s often referred to as the “hummingbird moth.”
The next shot I got was pretty minimal. Don’t fall out of your seats now:
“Split the Difference”
Taken with Sony a7rIV + Sony 24-105mm f/4 G
[ISO 640 ~ 63mm ~ f/11 ~ 1/800s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Playing with shadows here, and I wanted an up-close shot of the rock textures. I need to go back to my roots in shooting smaller scenes. Lately I’ve been getting carried away with these magnificent landscapes, while I’m falling short in the texture department.
Not popular, but necessary.
At this point two Kansas ladies rolled up to the rocks and started talking to me like I was their long lost friend. I expected nothing less in this sector of the Midwest. The tough part was getting them off my back.
“Where are you from? Are you a professional? Where are you heading? You know my daughter took a really great photo of the moon last week from her iPhone, hold on let me show you… It’s right here, hold on…”
And so on and so forth. Sunset was heating up and I’d fallen into the clutches of these old women like a rat in a cage. The place was only so big. I could only go so far. So I did what any rational person would do, and ran off like a madman.
There was another rock set in the distance, and I didn’t think these ladies had it in them to walk through the towering weeds. That’s where I got my magnum opus.
The sun was setting like a majestic king, so I loaded up ole’ yeller. The Sony 12-24mm f/4. Check out this joyous saint:
“Aliens in Kansas”
Taken with Sony a7rIV + Sony 12-24mm f/4 G
[ISO 1250 ~ 12mm ~ f/9 ~ 1/100s] [Focus Stack]
(Want a Print? Get one here. [Human has been removed.])
I threw myself in the corner for scale. Else those rocks could literally be 5 feet tall or 95 feet tall.
And that’s that. A beautiful start to the trip across the United States. Little did I know things were about to get worse. Much worse. Next stop, Kansas City... where my wacky fortune awaited.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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