Road Trip.

So summers just ended and tomorrow I will be starting my second year at university, I'm really looking forward to going back and really getting stuck into a project. I feel this summer I haven't been as creative as I could of been, I decided this holiday to really focus on photography more than filming as I felt it would help me improve my skills as a cinematographer by learning more about composition, using natural light and even a bit of colour editing/grading.

This year I was going away for 2 weeks for a small road trip around Nevada and Utah with the family, I've always gone on big holiday trips with my parents for as long as I can remember. Although I feel in the past years ive only just started to acknowledged how lucky I am that I've been to and am able to go to some of these crazy places, when I was younger I thought it was the norm to go away on big holidays every year, but as I got older I learnt how that wasn't the reality and how a lot of people are lucky to have even left the UK. With this in mind I decided I didn't want to waste these opportunities anymore, I decided this year I would take my camera and try to do as much photography as I possibly could.

On this road trip we were going to some pretty big places, we did do a similar trip to this a quite a few years ago but I was so young I couldn't remember it that much. We were first flying out to Las Vegas to stay a few days in the Mirage, after that we were renting a car and driving out the grand canyon to spend a few days. on the way there we were hoping to stop at a few places. We would then move onto driving up to monument valley where we would stay for a day, then move to Arches National Park and Canyon Land. with a few days there to explore we then would move onto Bryce Canyon before we headed to Zion National Park. After a few nights in Zion it was a long drive back to Las Vegas where we would spend the last few days of our trip, on the way back we were also hoping to stop and go to see the Little Alien Inn and gates to Area 51. Overall we were going to a lot of crazy beautiful places so as a filmmaker/photographer it was my duty to take as many great photos as I could!

I didn't want to be some touristy photographer on this trip, with a crazy 100-400mm lens firing the shutter like its was some mounted machine gun. No, I wanted to try something different. So I decided to limit myself to my Samyang 14mm F2.8 super wide angle lens, I love this lens like crazy, anyone who has used it will no have fun it is to shoot with, when you look through the view finder it seems like it can see wider than your eyes itself, and the slight fish eye in the corners is beautiful. The landscape where I was going was a lot of open nothingness, there's miles and miles of just desert in some bits. Because of this It meant I would have to think more about my shots, a super wide of nothing may look cool the first time, but not 100 photos of super wide nothing...

I started in Vegas, our first day we went out to walk down the strip so I made sure I had my camera at the ready to see what I could capture, I think the thing which really first shocked me over there when shooting was how bright and how blue the sky is. I had to be shooting between F16 and F22 basically the whole time there otherwise everything was over-exposed. With the sky being so blue it was so hard to get nice landscape shots, there were no cloud anywhere to be seen, clear skies sometimes can be nice but I prefer to have a bit of detail and depth to them if I can. This meant I would have to be a bit more creative with how I shot things.

After leaving Vegas we headed out to some more wilderness areas and national parks, I was really looking forward to this as ive always loved national parks and from my experiences before I knew I'd get some great photos.

The biggest thing I think I realised from these places were the colours. They were like nothing you've every seen before, normally if you're from the UK you're probably used to a lot of greenery and every so often blue skies. Here it was all bright blue skies, then a crazy mixture of green, orange, red, yellow, blue and even sometimes some pink and purple. One of my favourite places to shoot was in Zion national park, as that seemed to have the hugest range of colours, in Zion all the roads were made with red pavement which looked so cool on camera, so I made sure to get a few photos of that.

One of the days I made sure my dad, brother and I got up as early as we could to see the sun rise at the Grand Canyon, it was worth the 5am wake up. We got there and sun was just poking out behind the opposite side of the canyon, the day before I had spotted a point where it would be great to have a photo of myself. I set the camera up and handed it over to my dad, I quickly ran over to this ledge which was right next to the sun rise and got this beautiful picture of myself (well my dad pressed the shutter but I did the rest). I really love the depth in this photo, it just looks like layers because of the fade from the distance. This distance fade/fog was something I learnt quite a bit about on this trip, I don't know exactly why it happens but I was speaking to another photographer at one point and he was telling me how large fires from far away can cause it to be a lot more foggy and not allow you to see as far. This was a bit annoying as I was using a super wide angle so some things just looked weird off in the distance as they lost all colour but I tired to not let it affect me as much as I could.

Anyway that was my road trip around Nevada and Utah, I had such a great time taking photos and learning a lot about landscapes. I hope you enjoyed reading this post, if you want to see more photos from my trip you can check out my instagram.

Thanks for reading,

Alex.