Foto Friday: Fog in the Canyon

This is the Grand Canyon in 2019, one of my first trips out there. I was completely taken with the place and spent most of my time looking for spots that don’t show up in everyone else’s photos, angles and views I hadn’t already seen a hundred times before I got there.

This one is from the north side, late in the day with the sun going down. I called it Fog in the Canyon, though what’s really settling down there is haze. What I was after was the atmospheric perspective. As the light drops, that haze fills the canyon and the ridges stack up in layers, each one a little paler than the one in front of it. That fade is what gives the canyon its depth in a photograph. Without it, everything flattens into one wall of rock.

The haze does the work here: the closest ridge holds its color and its detail, and then it steps back ridge by ridge until the farthest ones are barely a suggestion against the sky. Your eye reads that as distance. It’s the same trick painters have used forever to put space into a flat surface, and the canyon hands it to you for free at the right time of day.

I look at this now and it takes me back to that stretch when every trip was new and I was chasing the version of the canyon I hadn’t seen yet. It’s a simple photo with layers of rock, a little haze, the last of the light. But it’s one I still like, and it still reminds me why I went looking off to the side instead of standing where everyone else stood.

More of my photography at imagesbyericbrown.com or on Instagram .