"Cracked earth and crumbling towers, remnants of an age that our kind is not old enough to have ever known. Here we walk on the ocean floor and bake in the sun, craning our necks to look up at what would have been a home to sea creatures. What the dirt remembers, one will never know."
Each of these monuments is hundreds of feet tall, towering over the sand and sunbaked rocks below. The scale is hard to imagine here but it would take hours to walk across this frame and most of those canyon lines would swallow a car whole.
The viewable distance in this photo is 1.2 miles (~2km). The file size is 25,000px on the long edge. There are 12 individual images stitched together to not only create an enormous scene but also to allow for exploration within the frame.
Two years before taking this photo I had visited these same monuments and fallen in love with the way the sun cast shadows across the land. Standing on a massive cliff that blocks most of the light and creates a dark foreground, these spires are tall enough to catch the last ten minutes of sunset while casting their own shadow.
After some research I determined that just before springtime there would be a 6 day window where the sunset light would cast a direct shadow in line with the monuments; the exact frame I had dreamt up after visiting this place for the first time nearly two years before.
I planned the entire month around making sure this shot was perfect, and on the first day I planned to camp on the edge of the cliff I got exactly what I wanted: all three massive spires lined up to create a straight shadow with no gaps.
Captured in Utah, 2024
