If you ever want to know where the middle-of-nowhere is, then just visit the Pawnee National Grassland in Weld County, Colorado. Okay, the grasslands aren’t actually so terribly remote… it only took me a little over two hours to reach the Pawnee Buttes from our home in the Denver-area, BUT it sure felt like the back-end of nowhere. The buttes themselves are pretty amazing, rising up as they do 250 feet above the surrounding prairie. You can see them from miles away. The entire area has a wide-open, desolate beauty. And also a very lonely, isolated feel since I didn’t see another person, or even another car, once I left the paved road (CO 14) and started winding back the rough, gravel roads into the heart of the grasslands.
I returned from this excursion with two photos that I’ve wanted to get for quite a while.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to get a shot of a remote stretch of road, straight-as-an-arrow, disappearing off into the horizon. I thought I might be able to get a shot like this when I was out in Utah, but never found just the right stretch of road that matched the image in my mind’s eye. This past Sunday, however, when I was on CO 14, somewhere past the town of Ault, I found my perfect road. I was heading east, topping a rise, when I looked in my rearview mirror and realized the stretch of road I’d just travelled over might just possibly be what I’d been seeking for. So I found a place to turn around… and sure enough, there it was—my perfect stretch of road! I tried out a few different compositions… some with more road than sky, some with more sky than road. This is my favorite. I really like this shot. There are no telephone poles or road signs or anything else to distract the eye from the clean, straight lines of the road and horizon. I’m also glad that it was a bit overcast that day, since the haze off to the west (masking the Rocky Mountains) seems to powerfully imply journeying into the unknown. As always, I used Photoshop Elements 6 to process the RAW data (digital negative). After my usual editing workflow in Elements, I also ran it through the Poster Edges filter.
For even longer than I’ve wanted a ‘road shot,’ I’ve wanted a ‘fence shot.’ I’ve taken plenty of pictures of fences, but have never been able to get a shot I felt good about. On this particular day, though, it was all coming together for me because after I got my ‘road shot’ and made my way back to the Pawnee Buttes, I got my ‘fence shot’! I had hiked out to the cliffs that are just south-west of the buttes and got some shots, then was heading back to the car, just about to pass through the gate at this fence, when I looked around… and sure as I was standing there, I knew this was going to be my long-awaited ‘fence shot.’ I backed up a few steps, explored a few different angles, and finally decided on this spot. I set the tripod up without unfolding the legs (so it remained about knee-high), since this would give me the perspective I wanted. I used a large aperture (an f/stop of 4.5 did the trick) since I wanted the closest post to be in sharp focus and everything else off into the distance to be less so. Since I don’t have a wide-angle lens (yet) I use the photomerge tool in Elements a lot for landscape shots, and that’s what I did here. I stitched together two vertical shots (near/far). This is also an HDR image, so I shot multiple exposures which I ran through Photomatix. The last thing I did in Elements was convert it to black&white. I used the infrared setting and then played around with the contrast a bit until I was happy with the result.
Needless to say, finally getting both my ‘road shot’ & ‘fence shot’ made my weekend. I’d like to return to the Pawnee National Grassland this spring and get some shots of the buttes with wildflowers in the foreground, and there’s also another shot I’d like to try from a spot farther out to the north-west. So stay tuned!
Thanks for reading about stuff I’ve photographed. ~Rich
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